
Class Ji 
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THE COLE LECTURES 
The Productive Beliefs - - - - ( '9*9 ) 

By Lynn H. Hough, D.D. 

Old Truths and New Facts - - ( 1918 ) 

By Charles E. Jefferson, D.D. 

The North American Idea - - - ( 19 n ) 

By James A. Macdonald, LL. D. 

The Foundation of Modern 
Religion i'9'6) 

By Herbert B. Workman, D. D. 

Winning the World for Christ - ( 1915 ) 

By Bishop Walter R. Lambuth. 

Personal Christianity --.•--( l 9*4 ) 

By Bishop Francis J. McConnell. 

The God We Trust ( '9*3 ) 

By G. A. Johnston Roes. 

What Does Christianity Mean ? - ( 19 12 ) 

By W. H. P. Faunce. 

Some Great Leaders in the 

World Movement i'9* 1 ) 

By Robert E. Speer. 

In the School of Christ - - - ( 19 10 ) 

By Bishop William Fraser McDowell. 

Jesus the Worker (*9°9) 

By Charles McTyeire Bishop, D. D. 

The Fact of Conversion - - - ( 1908 ) 

By George Jackson, B. A. 

God's Message to the Human Soul ( 1907 ) 

By John Watson (Ian Maclaren). 

Christ and Science ( *9° 6 ) 

By Francis Henry Smith. 

The Universal Elements of the 
Christian Religion ('9°5) 

By Charles Cuthbert Hall. 

The Religion of the Incarnation - ( 1903 ) 

By Bishop Eugene Russell Hendrix. 



The Cole Lectures for ip20 

delivered before Vanderbilt University 

A New Mind For 

the New Age 



By 
HENRY CHURCHILL KING, D.D., LL.D. 

President of Obertin College 




New York Chicago 

Fleming H. Revell Company 

London and Edinburgh 



Copyright, 1920, by 
FLEMING H. REVELL COMPANY 






New York : 1 58 Fifth Avenue 
Chicago: 17 North Wabash Ave. 
London : 2 1 Paternoster Square 
Edinburgh : 75 Princes Street 



g)CI.A605965 



THE COLE LECTURES 

THE late Colonel E. W. Cole of Nashville, Ten- 
nessee, donated to Vanderbilt University the sum 
of five thousand dollars, afterwards increased by 
Mrs. E. W. Cole to ten thousand, the design and con- 
ditions of which gift are stated as follows : 

" The object of this fund is to establish a foundation 
for a perpetual Lectureship in connection with the 
School of Religion of the University, to be restricted in 
its scope to a defense and advocacy of the Christian re- 
ligion. The lectures shall be delivered at such inter- 
vals, from time to time, as shall be deemed best by the 
Board of Trust ; and the particular theme and lecturer 
will be determined by the Theological Faculty. Said 
lecture shall always be reduced to writing in full, and 
the manuscript of the same shall be the property of 
the University, to be published or disposed of by the 
Board of Trust at its discretion, the net proceeds arising 
therefrom to be added to the foundation fund, or 
otherwise used for the benefit of the School of Re- 
ligion." 



Preface 

THE Cole Lectureship calls for six lec- 
tures. To this extent the form of 
the material of this book is deter- 
mined by the Lectureship; for the discussion 
falls into six corresponding chapters. Three 
chapters deal, it will be seen, with the New 
Age: its Evidence; its Perils; its Values. The 
three other chapters deal with the New Mind 
needed for the New Age; the Political, Eco- 
nomic, and Social Challenge; the Educational 
Challenge ; the Moral and Religious Challenge. 
It is obvious that this wide range of discussion 
can be covered only suggestively within the 
limits of the Lectureship, not exhaustively. 

I have not hesitated to use in this book much 
of the material of the little book — For a New 
America in a New World — written for the 
soldiers overseas ; since that was prepared only 
for private distribution among some of the 
returning soldiers, and was not published for 
the general public either there or in America, 
and has never been reprinted in America. 
Such material as has been used, is wrought, of 
7 



8 PREFACE 

course, into the connected argument of the 
present discussion. 

One hesitates to add to the number of books 
concerning the present critical times, but the 
Cole Lectureship requires publication, and one 
may hope that any honest attempt at interpre- 
tation of these difficult days may not be wholly 
without significance. 

H. C. K. 

Oberlin College. 



Contents 

LECTURE I 

The New Age: Its Evidence . . n 

I. Critical Points in Evolution. 
II. Disillusionment and Reaction Part of the 
Crisis. 

III. No Ordinary War. 

IV. The Changing World-Order. 

V. The Significance of These After- the- War 
Days. 

LECTURE II 

The New Age : Its Perils 37 

I. The Perils of Inevitable Inheritance from 
the War. 
II. The Perils of Disillusionment. 

III. The Perils of Reaction. 

IV. The Perils of Revolution. 

LECTURE III 

The New Age : Its Values . . .63 
I. The Values Involved in the Characteristics 

of the Present World-Order. 
II. The Help of the Moral Demonstrations of 
the War. 
III. The Greatest Ideal Achievements of the 
War. 



IO CONTENTS 

LECTURE IV 

The New Mind : The Political and So- 
cial Challenge . . . .105 

I. General Introduction. 

II. Defeating the Perils of the New Age. 

III. Preserving and Fulfilling the Values of the 
New Age. 

LECTURE V 

The New Mind : The Educational Chal- 
lenge 133 

I. The Power of Education. 

II. The Value of Education. 

III. The Comparative Failure of Our Educa- 

tion on the Ideal Side. 

IV. The End of Education. 
V. The Spirit of Education. 

VI. The Method of Education. 
VII. Other Needed Emphases in Education. 

LECTURE VI 

The New Mind : The Moral and Relig- 
ious Challenge . . . .167 
I. Grounds of Faith and Hope. 
II. The Basic Reality of Morals and Religion. 

III. The Inescapable Christ. 

IV. A Definitely Christian World-Civilization. 



LECTURE I 
THE NEW AGE : ITS EVIDENCE 



LECTURE I 

THE NEW AGE: ITS EVIDENCE 

SOME such theme as I have chosen for 
these lectures — A New Mind for the 
New Age — seems well-nigh unavoid- 
able. It is fairly thrust upon one by the criti- 
cal conditions of the time, as a problem that 
will not down. All thoughtful men, indeed, 
are so inevitably turning these questions over 
in their minds, that one may hope in unusual 
degree for that quick interplay of thought that 
keeps a discussion even of familiar themes 
stimulating and vital. 

Each one of us, moreover, is a factor in the 
problem we are to discuss, and in its solution. 
It concerns us mightily. No merely academic 
consideration, therefore, to which one might 
be moved by simple intellectual curiosity will 
suffice. For, as Professor Giddings says: 

A powerful barbarism is an appalling menace ; 
but it is not the supreme menace that threatens 
civilization at this hour. The supreme menace 
is the indifferentism, the negligence, and the pro- 
crastination, the paralysis of will that seems to be 
13 



14 THE NEW AGE 

affecting the civilized minority of the world's 
population. 

The imperative need, that is, in our time as 
at, the Christian era, is for a new mind. For 
the ringing call both of John the Baptist and of 
Christ was: Repent, — Change your minds, 
Get a new mind. And that new mind, we may 
be sure, will still include that utter truth to the 
trust of one's own individuality, and that will- 
ingness to take one's full share in the hard and 
disagreeable tasks in the world, which chal- 
lenge us again out of that far-away time: 
" Stir into flame the gift of God, which is in 
thee;" "Take thy part in suffering hard- 
ship." This threefold individual challenge, at 
least, our theme contains from the start. 

That the theme contains a like manifold 
challenge to classes and parties and churches 
and nations and races — for the restoration and 
creation of good-will and trust, for the full 
preservation and achievement of freedom, for 
a truer and more thoroughgoing democracy, 
for international relations that are not blind to 
the solidarity of the world, for a deeper and 
more penetrating spirituality — is hardly less 
plain. No study of world reconstruction can 
well help having its political, industrial, social, 
educational, moral, religious, and missionary 



ITS EVIDENCE 1 5 

applications. But perhaps they may all be 
grouped under the three general aspects, — po- 
litical, economic, and social; educational; and 
moral and religious. 

We are to think, then, of the New Age — its 
evidence, its perils, and its values; and of the 
New Mind needed for that age — the political, 
economic, and social challenge ; the educational 
challenge; and the moral and religious chal- 
lenge. 

But have we any right to speak of a " new 
age " ? Can we say that we have passed into 
a new age, whether for better or for worse? 
What is the evidence of a distinct change in the 
world-order, of a crisis in history, of a revolu- 
tion? Is there in our time anything corre- 
sponding to the crisis at the Christian era, for 
example, or at the Renaissance, and the Refor- 
mation, or at the French Revolution? Many 
men have been thinking of world reconstruc- 
tion. Is it more than a vain dream ? 

I 
Critical Points in Evolution 
To these questions it may be said, in the 
first place, that it is true, no doubt, that we are 
not to look for an absolute break in cause and 
effect relations m any crisis in history, however 
marked or disturbing. There is a continuous 



16 THE NEW AGE 

evolution that can be more or less definitely 
traced. But this is not to say that evolution 
must be uniform, with no critical points or 
periods ; or that human history knows no crises 
that are unmistakable. No dogmatic theory 
of evolution can dictate the facts. 

II 

Disillusionment and Reaction Part of the 
Crisis 

But even if the possibility of outstanding 
crises and revolutions in human history is fully 
recognized, do not the disillusionment and re- 
action that have set in since the war, already 
evince that there was none too much difference 
among the Powers in war aims, and that we 
are living in the " same old world," from 
which we may expect no great advances or 
even changes ? 

The reality of that disillusionment and reac- 
tion it is certainly impossible to question. Let 
one recall, for example, the solemn statement 
of our aims by President Wilson at America's 
declaration of war, and see how far we are, in 
spite of an Allied military victory over Ger- 
many, from a fulfillment of those aims: 

There are, it may be, many months of fiery 
trial and sacrifice ahead of us. It is a fearful 
thing to lead this great peaceful people into war, 



ITS EVIDENCE 1 7 

into the most terrible and disastrous of all wars, 
civilization itself seeming to be in the balance. 
But the right is more precious than peace, and 
we shall fight for the things which we have al- 
ways carried nearest our hearts — for democracy, 
for the right of those who submit to authority to 
have a voice in their own governments, for the 
rights and liberties of small nations, for a uni- 
versal dominion of right by such a concert of 
free peoples as shall bring peace and safety to all 
nations and make the world itself at last free. 
To such a task we can dedicate our lives and our 
fortunes, everything that we are and everything 
that we have, with the pride of those who know 
that the day has come when America is privi- 
leged to spend her blood and her might for the 
principles that gave her birth and happiness and 
the peace which she has treasured. God helping 
her, she can do no other. 

It was of these sentences that the London 
Evening Star wrote: 

We are not ashamed to say that these words 
are destined to echo through the ages and to be 
read by free men with grateful hearts. They 
fill our eyes with tears of pride and grati- 
tude. . . . Here and now the future of hu- 
manity is being shaped and moulded for all time. 

That was then our hope and faith. Can we 
hold them still? 

We shall have to face with some definiteness 



18 THE NEW AGE 

of detail this general disillusionment and reac- 
tion which have set in, when we consider the 
perils of our age. Here it concerns us clearly 
to see that the wide-spread disillusionment and 
reaction, following upon so stupendous a war, 
and sapping our energies and our moral ambi- 
tions, are themselves a part of the desperate- 
ness of our need — a part of the evidence of the 
crisis of the new age, in which humanity finds 
itself now involved. 

Ill 

No Ordinary War 

This general reaction, moreover, and the 
sickening spectacle of the renewal of the old 
selfish scramble among the nations, tend to call 
in question the significance of the zvhole zvar. 
And this tendency is strengthened by a careless 
and undiscriminating good-nature, that cares 
little for ideals, and that, on the easy-going 
policy of letting bygones be bygones, would 
throw away all the lessons of the war. Even 
a fine and honest desire to show a spirit of 
Christlike forgiveness — always to be de- 
manded — may be unconsciously bent to a like 
purpose. 

Now one would be glad, in a discussion like 
this, if he could be justified in leaving the war 
and its issues altogether behind him. But the 



ITS EVIDENCE 19 

Christian civilization of the world came quite 
too near to utter collapse in this war to war- 
rant such a course. We have no right to for- 
get the lessons of the war, if we are to under- 
stand at all this new age, and its imperative 
tasks. For it is just because this war was no 
ordinary war, that the human race now stands 
at perhaps the greatest crisis in its history. 

Not, then, to stir hatred and bad blood, or 
to keep alive the antagonisms of the war, but 
honestly to face essential issues, we need 
straightly to see what made this war so terrible 
and so fateful. 

1. Its length, the unexampled extent to 
which it engulfed the world, and its desperate 
intensity, were all signs of its extraordinary 
significance. But the secret of its terror does 
not lie in any of these outward characteristics. 

2. We come a little nearer to its deeper 
meaning, when we remember that one thing 
which made this war the most terrible of wars 
was because all the resources of modern science 
were laid under tribute for destructive pur- 
poses, until the world stood aghast; so that 
Saloman Reinach, anticipating the Peace Con- 
ference, was driven to say: 

At the future Congress, among the seats re- 
served for the delegates of the great Powers, one 
seat should remain vacant, as reserved to the 



20 THE NEW AGE 

greatest, the most redoubtable, though youngest 
of Powers: science in scarlet robes. That is the 
new fact ; that is what diplomacy should not ig- 
nore; if that imminent and execrable scandal is 
to be averted — the whole of civilization falling a 
victim to science, her dearest daughter, brought 
forth and nurtured by her, now ready to deal her 
the death-blow. The all-important question is 
the muzzling of the mad dog. Science, as sub- 
servient to the will to destroy, must be put in 
chains; science must be exclusively adapted to 
the works of peace. 

To like effect, in recent weeks, Professor 
Giddings has written: 

More than half of the population of the world 
is still barbaric in feeling and in purpose. It has 
not become humane or peace loving. . . . 
Into the hands of barbarians science has 
placed weapons of terrible effectiveness: arts of 
military organization and maneuver, explosives 
of terrific force, deadly gases, aeroplanes and 
submarines. Barbarism is equipped, or soon will 
be equipped, to try out its plan to conquer and to 
dominate. 

It is facts like these that make the threat of 
war so terrible, as I have elsewhere [Funda- 
mental Questions, p. 219] quoted Mr. Wells 
as saying: 

The thought of war will sit like a giant over 



ITS EVIDENCE 21 

all human affairs for the next two decades. It 
will say to us all : " Get your houses in order. If 
you squabble among yourselves, waste time, liti- 
gate, muddle, snatch profits and shirk obligations, 
I will certainly come again. I have taken all 
your men between eighteen and fifty, and killed 
and maimed such as I pleased — millions of them. 
I have wasted your substance contemptuously. 
Now you have multitudes of male children be- 
tween the ages of nine and nineteen running 
about among you, delightful and beloved boys. 
And behind them come millions of delightful 
babies. Of these I have scarcely smashed and 
starved a paltry hundred thousand perhaps. But 
go on muddling, each for himself and his parish 
and his family, and none for all the world, go on 
in the old way, stick to your rights, stick to your 
claims, each one of you, make no concessions and 
no sacrifices, obstruct, waste, squabble, and pres- 
ently I will come back again and take all that 
fresh harvest of life — all those millions that are 
now sweet children and dear little boys and 
youths — and I will squeeze it into red jam be- 
tween my hands, and mix it with the mud of 
trenches and feast on it before your eyes, even 
more damnably than I have done with your 
grown-up sons and young men. And I have 
taken most of your superfluities already; next 
time I will take your barest necessities." So — 
war ; and in these days of universal education the 
great mass of people will understand plainly now 
that that is his message and intention. Men who 



22 THE NEW AGE 

cannot be swayed by the love of order and crea- 
tion may be swayed by the thought of death and 
destruction. 

3. The very fact, too, that America felt 
compelled against all her traditions finally to 
come into this war in which it had no slightest 
political or territorial concern, is itself evidence 
that it had become plain practically to the en- 
tire American people, that this war was no 
ordinary war, but of the most fateful human 
interest; "civilization itself," in President 
Wilson's words, " seeming to be in the bal- 
ance." 

Mr. Hoover's cablegram to President Wil- 
son upon America's declaration of war, speak- 
ing for the members of the American Commis- 
sion for Relief in Belgium, was written out of 
such knowledge of the contending forces as 
scarcely another man had. It bore similar 
testimony to the fateful significance of this 
war. 

We wish to tell you that there is no word in 
your historic statement to Congress that does not 
find a response in all our hearts. For two and 
one-half years we have been obliged to remain 
silent witnesses of the character of the forces 
dominating this war. But we are now at liberty 
to say that, although we break with great regret 



ITS EVIDENCE 23 

our association with many German individuals 
who have given sympathetic support to our work, 
yet your message enunciates our conviction born 
of our intimate experience and contact, that there 
is no hope for democracy or liberalism and con- 
sequently for the real peace and safety of our 
country, unless the system which brought the 
world into this unfathomable misery can be 
stamped out once for all. 

4. But the heart of the matter lies even 
deeper than all this. Why did this war finally 
seem so different, for example, from the 
Franco-Prussian war? Why did Germany's 
cause come in the end to appear like a kind of 
embodiment of intrinsic evil? The explana- 
tion does not lie in the exaggerations of na- 
tional hates. The fact is that men felt a sort 
of moral horror of the German position, that 
meant much more than that, even when they 
had not thought the situation through. There 
need be no attempt to disguise the faults of the 
allied nations, or to hold them free from blame 
in the remoter causes of the war. Their pre- 
vious record had been most vulnerable. But 
men came gradually to see that what Germany 
had done was this: with her customary logical 
thoroughness she had taken what was worst in 
the selfish aggressions of the nations, and not 
only copied them, and justified them, but car- 



24 THE NEW AGE 

ried them to their farthest logical conclusion in 
an anti-Christian and immoral philosophy of 
civilization, of the State, of national life, and 
of the world structure. And this meant in lit- 
eral truth a death grapple with such degree of 
Christian civilization as the world had thus far 
attained. Little by little it became clear to 
men that all the highest interests of humanity 
and even the possibility of a decent civilization 
were at stake in this war. 

One can trace with some clearness the steps 
which Germany had taken, for she proceeded 
to develop with wonted thoroughness an apolo- 
getic for selfish aggressive zvars as a profitable 
and proper business for a State. 

She built that apologetic, first of all, on her 
unspeakably arrogant view of the Germans as 
a super-race, so superlatively gifted that the 
world could afford to have the contribution of 
all other races blotted out; of a "Kultur" so 
transcendent as to make its dominance over the 
world the highest good of the whole human 
race. The expressions of this arrogance be- 
fore and during the war were such as to con- 
stitute nothing less than an indecent moral 
exposure of the attitude of a great people. 
The doctrine of the Germans as " the chosen 
people " was the major premise of all their 
fright fulness throughout the war. Anything 



ITS EVIDENCE 2$ 

that might be supposed to put this divine race 
in its proper place of world dominion was 
counted as thereby justified and sanctified. 
And other nations need to be sure that they, 
too, do not fall, in a slightly disguised form, 
into a like arrogance. 

She built her apologetic, in the second place, 
upon an essentially immoral theory of the uni- 
verse, in her doctrine of the State as above all 
moral obligations of every kind — as free, there- 
fore, absolutely without scruple to take any 
course that seemed selfishly profitable. There 
was nothing so terrible that it could not be 
defended by this doctrine. 

She built her apologetic, in the third place, 
upon a materialistic interpretation of evolution 
and " the survival of the fittest " according to 
which only physical force and material gains 
are to be taken into account, and in which 
might at any stage was to be taken forthwith 
as the proof of right. In Treitschke's words: 
"Among all political sins, the sin of feebleness 
is the most contemptible. It is the political sin 
against the Holy Ghost." 

In this threefold doctrine, it is now to be 
noted, Germany persistently schooled her en- 
tire people, until they stood as a virtual unit 
behind her war ambitions. In Frederick Har- 
rison^ searching words: 



26 THE NEW AGE 

In all the world's history, no race has been so 
drilled, schooled, sermonized into a sort of in- 
verted religion of hate, envy, jealousy, greed, 
cruelty, and arrogance. Man and woman, girl 
and boy have been taught from childhood this 
inhuman vainglory and lust of power. It has 
grown to be their Gospel, Creed, Hymnal and 
Prayer Book. Britain and America cannot com- 
prehend how a great and intelligent people can 
have come to a cult so Satanic. 

That is a terrible indictment ; but its essential 
truth is evinced by the almost complete lack of 
any note of penitence among the German peo- 
ple for a frightfulness which was far worse 
than native barbarism — a frightfulness delib- 
erately adopted, scientifically developed, and 
philosophically defended. For a savage may 
have inconsistent streaks of kindness. A the- 
ory has no bowels of compassion. Nothing so 
much concerns Germany herself as utterly to 
repudiate her whole philosophy of national 
greatness. 

In fact, it may be doubted whether there has 
ever been before so conscious, deliberate, and 
stupendous an attempt to reverse the moral 
standards of the race. Kipling states the case 
with incisive insight when he says of the Ger- 
man: 

He thought out the hell he wished to create; 



ITS EVIDENCE 2^ 

he built it up seriously and scientifically with his 
best hands and brains ; he breathed into it his own 
spirit that it might grow with his needs; and at 
the hour that he judged best he let it loose on 
the world that till then had believed there were 
limits beyond which men born of women might 
not sin. . . . For it is the peculiar essence 
of German Kultur, which is the German re- 
ligion, that it is Germany's moral duty to break 
every tie, every restriction, that binds man to 
fellow-man, if she thinks it will pay. Therefore, 
all mankind are against her. Therefore, all man- 
kind must be against her till she learns that no 
race can make its way, or break its way, outside 
the borders of humanity. 

In literal truth, the worst possible thing that 
could have happened to the German people 
themselves was success in so wicked a war. 
On the other hand, the greatest kindness to 
them is that they should find that the war has 
been thoroughly unprofitable. But no mere 
sorrow for consequences will replace the neces- 
sity of genuine penitence. For the fruits of 
penitence cannot be had without penitence it- 
self. And one of the most sinister elements 
in the world's life to-day is this very general 
lack of penitence on the part of the German 
nation, not so much for particular deeds, as for 
their whole anti-Christian philosophy of na- 



28 THE NEW AGE 

tional life. For it suggests the possibility of a 
like war to follow. 

One is most reluctant to say these things in 
times of peace. But to forget essential moral 
differences is to forget the great ends for which 
our dead gave their lives, and to dishonour 
their memory — 

If ye break faith with us who die, 
We shall not sleep tho' poppies grow 
In Flanders' fields. 

Moreover, to forget essential moral differ- 
ences is finally to cry, " Peace, peace, when 
there is no peace." We may not " prophesy 
smooth things " here. To gloss over the plain 
fact that this war has been in essence a head-on 
collision of irreconcilable ideals not only helps 
nothing, it confuses the issue, and it destroys 
from the beginning the possibility of the res- 
toration of honest relations. Even decent re- 
lations between nations on the German theory 
are simply impossible. Unless, therefore, the 
whole cause of the Allies has been a false one ; 
unless the human race is passively to resign 
itself to repetitions of this war on a still more 
terrible scale, truly friendly and cooperative 
relations with the Central Powers imperatively 
demand that Germany renounce forever her 
entire philosophy of the State, and come into 



ITS EVIDENCE 29 

some honest agreement with the Allies as to 
the fundamental aims and standards of civili- 
zation and of international relations. 

This is what the war at bottom meant. This 
is what we mean, too, when we say that the 
supremely significant fact about this war is 
that on the part of the Allies it was a war for 
fundamentally moral and religious aims; that 
it was a war for the conviction that the moral 
law extends to nations as truly as to individ- 
uals; that the principles of morals and Chris- 
tianity either has no warrant at all, or holds 
in full force for classes and nations and races. 

IV 

The Changing World-Order 
But it is not only this epoch-making charac- 
ter of the great war which has brought a new 
crisis in our time. Besides the war's awesome 
application of modern science to destructive 
purposes and the relatively new immoral phi- 
losophy of the State and of national life, that 
aimed at reversing the moral standards of the 
race, there are other characteristics of our 
time which indicate a changing world-order 
and so something that may fittingly be called a 
new age. 

1. Its characteristics. It is possible, at this 
point, to do little more than name some of the 



30 THE NEW AGE 

outstanding characteristics of this changing 
world-order. These characteristics may be 
said to be: the constantly intensifying world 
solidarity; the prodigious increase in the last 
century through modern science of the world's 
resources of power and wealth and knowledge ; 
forced scientific cooperation and organization 
on a scale and to a degree never before seen; 
the almost world-wide trend toward democracy 
and universal education; the establishment of 
a League of Nations ; a steadily growing inter- 
nationalism; and the deepening sense of the 
necessity of larger and more significant goals 
than organized humanity has yet cherished. 
These characteristics all bear witness to the 
reality of a new age. 

2. The World Still Plastic. We may also 
hope that with these characteristics, the world 
may prove still plastic enough to give assur- 
ance of greater achievements than have yet 
come out of the war. 

Even the strong reactionary tendency seen 
in many quarters cannot wholly escape some 
vision of the fact that " Humpty-Dumpty " can- 
not be put together again, and that in any case 
all of the old is not good enough to deserve 
preservation. Reaction cannot, one would 
think, be permanently blind to the constantly 
recurring conflict, in which progress is always 



ITS EVIDENCE 3 1 

involved, — the conflict between " historic legit- 
imate right " and " abstract natural right " ; so 
that mere reaction is self-confessed wrong. 

On the other hand, there is a wide-spread 
tendency to call everything into question. Per- 
haps Laski does not exaggerate this trend when 
he writes : 

We have concentrated into the fury of the past 
five years a generation of eager experience. Cer- 
tainly no such intellectual upheaval has been 
known since the spectacle of Revolutionary 
France burst upon a world divided between fear 
and admiration. Over and above the spectacle 
of a world amazed at the prevalence of dissent 
from acknowledged dogma in art and science and 
religion, we have a wide-spread attack upon so- 
cial notions not a decade ago conceived as funda- 
mental. . . . Every generation must think 
out anew the conditions of its freedom. . . . 
What we fail consistently to realize is how much 
the overwhelming force of society is always 
opposed to novelty. We live by our routines. 
[The New Republic, Feb. 18, 1920.] 

While we can be sure, then, that both the 
radical and conservative instincts are at work, 
we may hope that we shall not be so mastered 
by old habit and routine as to fail to make full 
use of such plasticity as exists in the world- 
order for a great forward advance. From this 



32 THE NEW AGE 

point of view, Bolshevism — however one inter- 
prets it — may have a world service to render, 
in compelling us all to face new problems, and 
to refuse to accept shallow, easy-going solu- 
tions. 

V 

The Significance of These After-the-war Days 
The simple fact is, that one writes in these 
times under the constant sense of the inade- 
quacy of human language to express either the 
possible losses or the possible gains of these 
fateful days. 

Mr. Wells made Mr. Britling say early in 
the war: " This is the end and the beginning of 
an age. This is something far greater than 
the French Revolution . . . and we live 
in it." If that was true when Mr. Wells wrote 
those words, it is still more true now. For we 
are only beginning to see that the world has 
been shaken to its centre in this war, as it was 
not shaken even by the French Revolution. 
And in these days Dawson's words yet hold: 
" We are living at a time when days and weeks 
have the fullness and significance of years and 
decades." 

The immeasurable cost of the peace which 
has come makes any other view a blasphemy. 
Let one make real to himself the cost in the 



ITS EVIDENCE 33 

treasure of wealth, handicapping constructive 
enterprises of good for decades to come. Let 
him put vividly before himself in terms of in- 
dividuals the sacrifice of life. Let him remem- 
ber that France alone lost in those killed in 
battle one million, four hundred thousand men. 
Great Britain's number of slain brings the 
total, simply for those two nations, up to more 
than two millions. Russia estimates a toll of 
not less than seven millions. The Copenhagen 
Society for the Study of the Consequences of 
the War concludes that the total cost of the 
world war in lives has reached the appalling 
figure of 35,380,000. And this is to say noth- 
ing of those other millions of wrecked lives 
and wrecked homes. Well may one repeat 
Simons' words: " Millions have died that the 
trampling war madness might end. It is better 
to see that they have not died in vain than to be- 
wail their dying." If, then, we are to keep our 
faith at all in a God of truth and righteousness, 
in the fundamental honesty of the universe, we 
must believe that such unimaginable sacrifices 
have not been poured out in vain. No small 
advances will answer the moral demands which 
men will here inevitably make. 

Rupert Brooke, the brilliant young Briton, 
who himself a little later in the war joined the 
company of those whom he calls "the rich 



34 THE NEW AGE 

dead," shadowed forth both their untold sacri- 
fices and their divine gifts to men, in words 
which are a perpetual challenge to the living, 
to keep these gifts true as the permanent spir- 
itual fruit of the war: 

Blow out, you bugles, over the rich Dead ! 

There's none of these so lonely and poor of old, 
But, dying, has made us rarer gifts than gold. 

These laid the world away ; poured out the red 
Sweet wine of youth ; gave up the years to be 
Of work and joy, and that unhoped serene, 
That men call age; and those who would have 
been, 

Their sons, they gave, their immortality. 

Blow, bugles, blow! They brought us, for our 
dearth 
Holiness, lacked so long, and Love, and Pain ; 

Honour has come back, as a king, to earth, 
And paid his subjects with a royal wage; 

And Nobleness walks in our ways again ; 
And we have come into our heritage. 

And for the civilians, a cartoon in the Chi- 
cago Evening Post strikes home to every 
thoughtful man. It represents " our better 
selves," from the vantage ground of unstinted, 
unselfish service, looking back at " our old 
selfish existence " in its scramble for gain, and 
asking musingly: "Is it possible we will go 
back to it?" And the significance of the 



ITS EVIDENCE 35 

question lies not simply in the deterioration of 
the individual there threatened, but in the un- 
speakable losses for the race so involved. 

For we have now come to the most critical 
time of all in this whole world struggle. Have 
we really won this war? That is still to be 
determined. There is such a thing as a deci- 
sive military victory, coupled at the same time 
with an equally decisive defeat of the high 
aims for which the war was fought. If we 
reinstate in power, under other names, the 
same great evils against which we fought, these 
millions will have died in vain, and we shall 
have a still more terrible war to fight over 
again in the years ahead. And these after- 
the-war days bear depressing witness how eas- 
ily our frail human nature slumps back into 
the old ways — the old indulgences, the old an- 
tagonisms, the old injustices. 

No wonder that Lloyd George said so pas- 
sionately to a labour deputation in the midst of 
the war: " Don't always be thinking of getting 
back to where you were before the war. Get 
a really new world. . . . The readier we 
are to cut away from the past, the better we 
are likely to succeed. Think out new ways, 
new methods of dealing with old problems. 
Get a new world/' 

My chief fear for all the later months of the 



36 THE NEW AGE 

war was that when peace came, it would come 
suddenly (as it did), and that we should all be 
so war-weary, so sick and disgusted with the 
whole strife and its consequences, so anxious 
to get back to the old ways, and to any kind of 
a patched-up peace, that we should nervelessly 
let slip out of our hands the largest single op- 
portunity that the race has ever had for a 
great advance. Just here lies the significance 
of these after-the-war days. 



LECTURE II 
THE NEW AGE: ITS PERILS 



LECTURE II 

THE NEW AGE: ITS PERILS 

IF we have, then, to reckon in some real 
sense with a new age — with days critic- 
ally significant for all civilization and for 
the vital interests of all men, we need clearly to 
see both the perils and the values of this new 
age, and to withstand those perils and to carry 
on and fulfill those values. For, speaking only 
for our own country, it must be frankly said 
that America is in far more danger of essential 
failure now in these after-the-war responsibili- 
ties than in the time of war. 

First of all, what are the chief perils that 
men confront in these days following upon the 
greatest revolution the world has ever seen, 
days that ought to be days of vision, of con- 
structive imagination, of girded wills, and of 
high and world-wide accomplishment? 

As has already been intimated, all the perils 
of this critical time may be summed up in one 
— the peril of letting slip what is probably the 
largest single opportunity that the race has ever 
had for a great advance. But this inclusive 
39 



40 THE NEW AGE 

peril would itself be the result of certain spe- 
cific dangers now threatening the world's life 
—the perils of an inevitable inheritance of evil 
from the war; of disillusionment; of reaction; 
of destructive revolution. 

I 

The Perils of the Inevitable Inheritance of 
Evil from the War 

1. First of all, in the evil inheritance, this 
most terrible of wars was marked by frightful 
destructivcncss in every sphere. Just because 
it was, as we saw, no ordinary war, there was 
such a massing of all destructive agencies as 
left no realm of good unharmed, whether 
property, or human life, or constructive enter- 
prise of civilization, or beauty or friendly rela- 
tions. This destruction and wasting bank- 
ruptcy threaten to lay a heavy burden on 
generations yet unborn and become a direct 
handicap on every good cause. 

2. Indeed, the direct toll of the war was so 
intolerable as to bring all decent civilization to 
the verge of collapse. Count Okuma deliber- 
ately declared during the war that the Orient 
was seeing nothing less than the death of Euro- 
pean civilization. And in multitudes of situa- 
tions the condition of things is distinctly worse 
now than at the time of the armistice. Pro- 



ITS PERILS 41 

fessor Ward hardly overstates the case when 
he says: " Whatever any war may have done 
for progress in the past, it is almost practically 
certain that the universal war of modern times, 
both in its extent and in its nature, is humanity 
committing suicide." [The New Social Order, 
p. 377.] It may be doubted if civilization 
could outlive even one more such war. So 
real are the perils. 

3. Another evil inheritance from this war 
is the infectious spread of the intoxication of 
power. The use of force by the Central 
Powers on the most stupendous scale the world 
had ever seen, drove the Allied Powers to a 
like dependence on force. Nations became 
drunk with power. For it is not only true that 
tyrants use power, but that unlimited power 
breeds tyrants. Such tremendous and irre- 
sponsible power as this war made possible cre- 
ates the appetite for more power, and like a 
drug undermines character in man and nation. 
The curse of this intoxication of power is likely 
to rest like a spell upon the nations for years 
to come. 

4. This intoxication of power, moreover, is 
only part of that Prussianising of the nations 
— even the Allies — that was almost inevitably 
involved in the conflict with Prussia. If, as 
the philosophers contend, there is a certain 



42 THE NEW AGE 

well-nigh unavoidable approximation to that 
against which we fight, a part of the victory of 
the Teutons will be that even in defeat they 
communicated to the Allies the fever that was 
in themselves. 

5. But one of the worst elements in our 
evil inheritance from the war is the wide- 
spread tendency to carry over into times of 
peace the moods and methods of war — to apply 
war measures to peace conditions. America 
has witnessed since the armistice increasing 
violation of fundamental liberties, such as, it 
would seem, should call forth protest from 
every true friend of democracy and freedom. 
As Mr. Devine puts it: " Freedom of speech, 
of press and of assembly is denied to those to 
whom we do not wish to be just, and the denial 
comes not from revolutionists but from fright- 
ened conservatives." There has been an all 
too ready appeal to force, to raiding, to injunc- 
tions, to illegal deportations. Compulsions, 
hardly justified in a free country even in war 
time, have been used without compunction to 
deal with problems of peace. It is refreshing 
to have Judge Bourquin, a Federal Judge of 
Montana, in a trial of an alien arrested without 
warrant and ordered deported, speak out in no 
uncertain tones to the whole country on the 
issues involved: 



ITS PERILS 43 

The alien who advocates the doctrines revealed 
in the case, is a far less danger to this country 
than are the parties who in violation of law and 
order, of humanity and justice, have brought him 
to deportation. They are the spirit of intolerance 
incarnate, and the most alarming manifestation 
in America to-day. Thoughtful men who love 
this country and its institutions see more danger 
in them and in their practices, and the govern- 
ment by hysteria that they stimulate, than in the 
miserable, baited " Reds " that are the ostensible 
occasion of them all. [The New Republic, March 
31, 1920.] 

In the language of Judge Anderson of the 
United States District Court of Boston, " It is 
no light thing to deprive men of their liberty. " 

According to the impartial and dispassionate 
testimony of the investigators of the Social 
Service Commission of the Federal Council of 
Churches, during the steel strike in Pennsyl- 
vania, the most elementary freedom of speech 
and freedom of assembly, even where there 
was no violence, were interfered with. In the 
same strike, the press was so manipulated that 
it is the simple truth to say that the people were 
not allowed to have the facts necessary to a 
correct judgment. For example, the report of 
the Senate Committee upon the strike was so 
presented in the great body of the daily press 
as to seem much more unfavourable to the 



44 THE NEW AGE 

strikers than in fact it was. Only a few of 
the more independent weekly journals gave 
both sides of the controversy. To strike thiis 
at the sources of knowledge in the press — it is 
not to be forgotten — is to imperil all demo- 
cratic government. 

Moreover the expulsion of the five Socialists 
from the New York Assembly and the sequel 
in the abominable Lusk bills, with their pro- 
posals to dictate opinions to citizens, are so 
hideous an invasion of rights in a representa- 
tive government as to make one feel that our 
national humiliation at home is to be made to 
match our humiliation abroad. For the action 
of the New York Assembly means nothing less 
than that — in another's vigorous language — 
" it has denied to a large group of American 
citizens the exercise of the right of political 
representation because it does not agree with 
their political and economic opinions. In so 
far as its action prevails, the State of New 
York has ceased to be a democracy. ,, [Nezv 
Republic, April 14, p. 200.] No wonder that 
Mr. Hughes and the New York Bar Associa- 
tion protested ! The standing committee of the 
Association on the character of proposed legis- 
lation, it is also to be noted, speaks out in no 
uncertain terms upon the Lusk bills. And this 
testimony from lawyers upon this point is par- 



ITS PERILS 45 

ticularly significant, for as a body lawyers are 
likely to be pretty conservative. 

6. As a part of the inheritance of evil from 
the war must be reckoned also the inescapable 
reaction from the stress and strain and excite- 
ment of war. It was to be expected. All men 
feel it in some form. Each class is inclined to 
think that it itself has earned and now de- 
serves special consideration. There is wide- 
spread distaste for common peaceful work and 
for moderate profits. Habits of industry and 
thrift have been broken down. Passionate 
pursuit of pleasure and of uncontrolled self- 
indulgence has become epidemic, as even our 
comic papers point out. These are only a few 
particulars in the natural general demoraliza- 
tion of life which comes through war. This 
demoralization is an omnipresent peril to be 
overcome. 

7. Nor in our joy over the way in which 
the great cause of war called forth a ringing 
response from soldiers and nation alike may 
we shut our eyes to the perils which the war 
had for the inner life of the soldier — not only 
the more obvious coarser temptations of im- 
purity, obscenity and profanity; but the 
subtler temptations of distance from home, of 
loneliness, of the abnormal absence of the so- 
ciety of good women, of facing at some points 



46 THE NEW AGE 

the quite different standards of another people, 
of much idleness, of intolerable monotony, of 
dishonesty through the breaking down of the 
sense of private property, of the reduced neces- 
sity for the man's own initiative, of the moral 
and religious shock that comes from familiar- 
ity with the inevitable brutalities of war. 
Some of these conditions have deeply marked 
many men, and made more difficult their ad- 
justment to these days of peace. Such abnor- 
mal conditions as war produces can hardly fail 
often to work abnormal results. 

8. And when one turns to note the wider 
harvest of evil from the war, he may accept 
the careful judgment of one of the ablest of 
American correspondents abroad writing soon 
after the armistice: 

The spectacle of European ruin is simply ap- 
palling. Nineteenth century civilization has 
broken down. . . . There is a collapse of 
human moral energy, a revival of the primitive 
barbaric instincts and the fierce endeavour to have 
one's little private will by force. . . . Up 
through the European chaos is surely creeping 
the menace not of socialism but of Bolshevism, 
which is the revengeful shadow of reckless 
modern materialism. 

And one of the most thoughtful of our 
American editors adds in comment: 



ITS PERILS 47 

In spite, that is, of the victory over Germany, 
and as a direct consequence of the use of war on 
such a destructive scale in the interest of civiliza- 
tion, the very tissue of civilization is suffering 
from corruption and disease. 

This American judgment is confirmed from 
an English point of view, when, in terms per- 
haps too pessimistic, Mr. Churchill feels com- 
pelled to say that the state of the world at the 
present time in no way betokens the endurance 
of peace, except from the point of view that 
the fighters are very much exhausted. 

People talk about the world on the morrow of 
the Great War as if somehow or other we had 
all been transported into a higher sphere. We 
have been transformed into a sphere which is 
definitely lower from almost every point of view 
than that which we had attained in the days be- 
fore Armageddon. . . . There never was a 
time when more complete callousness and indif- 
ference to human life and suffering were ex- 
hibited by the great communities all over the 
world. On the expanse of Europe an insidious 
seething scene of misery has formed — a malevo- 
lence which is not for the moment dangerous, be- 
cause it proceds only on the basis of exhaustion 
of a kind that the world has never before 
recorded. 

And the casual way in which three or four 



48 THE NEW AGE 

premiers — ignoring the great bulk of the na- 
tions — are now parcelling out the spoils and 
determining the fate of the world, gives small 
ground for expectation of just and permanent 
settlements from the war. 

These are some of the perils involved in our 
inheritance of evil from the war. With all 
possible qualifications, one can hardly fail to 
recognize the gravity of the perils which the 
war has left us. 

II 

The Perils of Disillusionment 
To this direct inheritance of evil from the 
war must be added, in the second place, the 
perils of disillusionment, sapping courage and 
faith. For this direct inheritance of evil 
tended at once to counteract hoped-for gains, 
and so to lead to disillusionment and depres- 
sion, if not to cynicism. 

The historical situation at Paris after the 
armistice brought this disillusionment to a cli- 
max, certainly for many of the most thought- 
ful Americans. 

In the first place, there had been no mistak- 
ing the rare idealism with which America came 
into the war. For America made her decision 
on high ideal, and essentially Christian 
grounds. Not for territorial or commercial 



ITS PERILS 49 

gains; abjuring all idea of later indemnities; 
practically unmoved, it must be stated, by 
thoughts even of self-defense; after every 
righteous effort to preserve peaceful relations 
with Germany had been exhausted; when the 
greatness of the issues had become plain; in 
the face of fixed American traditions ; in mar- 
vellously unified fashion; and across three 
thousand miles of sea; America threw her 
whole self, with her every resource, into this 
struggle, for the sake of righteousness, of hu- 
manity, of civilization. It was a singularly 
impressive moral movement. No wonder that 
the distinguished litterateur, Hughes le Roux, 
voiced his conviction, in an address at the 
American Military Headquarters in France, 
that history had never seen a great nation 
moved to war by so completely unselfish and 
idealistic motives. 

In the second place, from the time America 
entered the war up to the armistice, President 
Wilson was recognised and zvelcomed as inter- 
preter and protagonist of the cause of the 
Allies. He was in truth the liberal leader of 
the world. The influence of the fourteen 
points upon the armistice and in the Near East 
was immense, as the inquiries of the Commis- 
sion on Mandates in Turkey made certain, and 
far greater than it is now the fashion to admit. 



50 THE NEW AGE 

Class and party and national selfishness — in the 
appalling strain of the Great War — were in 
abeyance, and men were glad to accept Presi- 
dent Wilson as their spokesman because he 
made them believe that there was in the holo- 
caust of war something greatly worth fighting 
for. 

In the third place, President Wilson's influ- 
ence and his generally idealistic attitude con- 
tinued to prevail in large degree in the Peace 
Conference through the time of the adoption 
of the Covenant of the League of Nations; 
and forward-looking men could still believe 
that the foundations for a great new world- 
order were being laid, and could rejoice that 
they had lived to see the day when so noble a 
document could be made the practical outcome 
of a world war. 

But when the nations turned to the actual 
making of treaties — the immense difficulties of 
which should not be forgotten — it became rap- 
idly clear that the selfish scramble among the 
nations had set in. The Allies were glad to 
use Mr. Wilson as an instrument for the ac- 
complishment of their war aims. But they 
found it singularly easy to forget him and his 
principles when the war was over. Even in 
the course of the war, selfish unjustifiable se- 
cret treaties had been made. And now men 



ITS PERILS 51 

witnessed, for example, the Japanese treatment 
of Shantung; Italy's attitude toward the Jugo- 
slavs; the excessive demands of the French; 
Britain's absorption of Egypt and Persia, and 
her general insatiable appetite for more terri- 
tory ; the utter ignoring by both the British and 
the French of the solemn promises to the Arabs 
in the Anglo-French Declaration of Novem- 
ber 9, 1918; and the mistaken provincial selfish 
patriotism of the American Senate in the at- 
tempt to return to America's old isolation, to 
repudiate the rare idealism with which America 
came into the war, and basely to shirk her 
world responsibilities. 

Because of all this, disillusionment, depres- 
sion and almost cynicism spread like a plague 
among many of the best of America's repre- 
sentatives abroad. One could feel it in the 
very air of Paris. Men asked themselves in 
amazement: Is all this not simply the spirit and 
methods of the old condemned diplomacy? Is 
there any real difference in fundamental ideals? 
Are these the aims for which America fought ? 
Have any of us, indeed, sufficiently taken into 
account what this disillusionment meant to our 
young soldiers, so that many of them almost 
inevitably felt betrayed, and thus have become 
embittered ? There followed, naturally enough, 
something like an utter breakdown of faith in 



52 THE NEW AGE 

the Allies, and among the Allies in one an- 
other. And this general breakdown of faith 
in one another, in the dealing of the nations 
with one another, is in itself a national and 
world calamity — a moral world panic and the 
gravest peril of our time. For where trust has 
vanished, great cooperative goals for humanity 
are made impossible. And so faith and cour- 
age fail. 

These are the perils of disillusionment. 

Ill 

The Perils of Reaction 
When face to face with the evil inheritance 
from the war, and with disillusionment as to 
anticipated gains, it is natural for men to seek 
to scuttle back to the old goods — to look long- 
ingly back to the flesh pots of Egypt, to the 
pre-war world with its frequent comfort, its 
openness everywhere to travel, and its fairly 
decent world relations. All this, men tend to 
set over against the present almost impossible 
economic conditions, and the present suspicion, 
fear, ill-will, and threat of Bolshevism and 
mob-rule. The thought of reaction, thus, the 
desire simply to bring back the old situation, 
rather than to venture on a world untried, is 
almost inevitable. We have the perils of reac- 
tion to reckon with. 



ITS PERILS 53 

1. This tendency to simple reaction affects 
us all, almost against our will. There is, to 
begin with, the natural reaction from the 
physical and moral strain of the war — a kind 
of pathological fatigue that catches us un- 
awares. There is, too, the lazy longing for 
the ease of the old ways, the old routine, the 
worn ruts, that makes us impatient of the per- 
sistent demands of any new regime. There is, 
also, the mental indolence of " old-fogyism," 
as James calls it, that besets all men — the un- 
willingness to face new issues, to see them as 
new, to call them by their right names, and to 
adjust to them — instead of clapping old labels 
upon them and putting them away in the old 
pigeon-holes, and leaving one's own mind un- 
disturbed. Everybody hates mental house- 
cleaning, and there is never a good time for it. 
To ask a whole generation — or at least the 
leaders — to undertake this repugnant task with 
energies already well-nigh spent, seems almost 
hopeless. Moreover the psychological mood 
in which men find themselves after this deso- 
lating war is unfavourable to any decisions — 
to say nothing of the trenchant and sweeping 
decisions now called for. The prevalent mood 
is rather that of seeking to evade all decisions 
and responsibilities, of substituting for action 
fatal facility in finding excuses for inaction. 



54 THE NEW AGE 

Nor is it only wearied or enfeebled will that 
tends to reaction. The world-situation is so 
complex, its evils so threatening, and its prob- 
lems and tasks so overwhelming, that men 
naturally distrust their own insights and fear 
new and untried ways. Who shall declare, for 
example, the real significance of the Russian 
revolution and the Bolshevist movement ? Who 
shall lay the foundations in righteousness of a 
Balkan settlement? Who shall point the sure 
way to industrial righteousness and peace? 
Who, in short, knows the road to that diviner 
world for which we really fought this war? 
Not only our paralysis of will, but our igno- 
rance, too, thus tends to reaction — to a choice 
of familiar goods, of lesser value than of the 
greater goods of a new and unknown world. 

2. Naturally this tendency to reaction which 
besets us all is much accentuated in those 
classes zvho had a privileged lot in the pre-zvar 
order. Many of those, thus privileged, are 
honestly blind to the realities of the situation. 
They have asked themselves no searching 
questions as to unearned special privileges. 
They truly believe that they are the most im- 
portant people, and best fitted to control, and 
that they constitute the bulwarks of civilization 
against the threatening tide of Bolshevism. 
Their reactionism is blind but honest and in- 



ITS PERILS 55 

dignant. It is all the more dangerous on that 
account. 

3. But reaction has its chief support in 
human selfishness — class selfishness, partisan 
selfishness, and national selfishness; though 
selfishness of another kind may also lead to 
revolution. 

Class selfishness leads to reaction, when the 
class has especially benefited by the old order. 
It wants to retain its old position of privilege. 
It deliberately uses the fears of mob rule to 
maintain its own rule. It stands for no true 
democracy, and so does not hesitate in time of 
peace to violate the freedom of the people by 
measures essentially belonging to war and of 
doubtful warrant even then. Such class-selfish 
reactionaries inevitably sow the seed of the 
very revolution they profess to fear. 

Partisan selfishness, too, is capable of great 
treacheries both to the nation and to the world. 
Few more shameful exhibitions of such selfish- 
ness have been seen than in America in recent 
months. The whole blame does not belong to 
any one party. Both parties have shown a 
willingness to sacrifice world interests unspeak- 
ably precious, rather than that the other party 
should share in the credit of large achievement. 
It is hardly open to doubt that vastly greater 
results, in line with America's aims in this 



56 THE NEW AGE 

war, could have been achieved in Paris, if our 
conferees could have had behind them a united 
nation. All too largely the party leaders have 
cared for nothing but their own control. Their 
general attitude, as reflected in the Senate, 
has been thoroughly reactionary. They have 
shown no willingness honestly to face the new 
issues raised by the war. They have been, 
rather, quite ready to make the gravest world- 
issues a football of party politics, and so basely 
to repudiate America's highest moral achieve- 
ment — the rare idealism with which she came 
into the war. For they put their country — 
that had won highest honour — to black shame 
in the eyes of all the nations by making selfish 
national interests supreme, by advocating self- 
ish and cowardly return to the old isolation, 
and by so shirking altogether its fair share in 
world responsibilities. Was America's politi- 
cal leadership ever more nearly bankrupt, or 
she herself more humiliated? 

As to national selfishness, the discussion of 
the Paris situation should have already made 
clear how reactionary it is, — how inevitably it 
harks back to an old world of selfish intrigue, 
and stands square athwart the path to anything 
like a brotherhood of the nations. For the 
Allies were fighting in the war against aggres- 
sive ruthless selfishness in the Central Powers. 



ITS PERILS 57 

It is moral stultification to fall into a like atti- 
tude themselves, even if the selfish greed is 
somewhat modified. 

Moreover, there is no hope of the new and 
righteous world of our dreams by the way of 
national selfishness. That is a contradiction 
in terms. This war has made some demonstra- 
tions in the field of national morals, and one of 
them is the demonstration of the ultimate stu- 
pidity of national as well as of individual self- 
ishness. Contrast, for example, America's 
present immeasurable loss of prestige with its 
honour in coming into the war. And national 
selfishness not only betrays the individual na- 
tion which cherishes it; it betrays as well the 
whole brotherhood of nations. Only by un- 
selfish cooperation of the nations on a gigantic 
scale was civilization saved in this war. Are 
we to trust national selfishness now to pre- 
serve it? 

IV 

The Perils of Destructive Revolution 
But selfishness may lead to destructive revo- 
lution, as well as to reaction, and we must 
reckon with the entirely possible perils of such 
revolution. Class selfishness on the part of 
the unprivileged may be as dangerous to hu- 
man progress through destructive revolution 



58 THE NEW AGE 

as class selfishness on the part of the privileged 
through sheer reaction. 

The rule of no one class — privileged or un- 
privileged — is democracy. For such class rule 
is neither just to all the people, nor even good 
for the ruling class itself. Professor Rausch- 
enbusch points out in a striking passage the in- 
evitable tragedy of swollen fortunes: [Chris- 
tianising the Social Order, p. 309.] 

The social order as it now is places its bene- 
ficiaries in a position where they cannot escape 
wrong and unhappiness. If they obey its laws, 
they enrich their own life, but at the expense of 
others, and in the end their apparent advantage 
turns out to be their own curse. They escape 
from the necessity of work, but in time idleness 
undoes either them or their descendants. Their 
wealth seems to promise large means of doing 
good, but they find their philanthropy a heavy 
burden on themselves and a questionable blessing 
for others. Their money gives them power, but 
that power is an intoxicant that undermines their 
sense of human values. It piles up their pleas- 
ures, but the more they surfeit, the less pleasure 
do they feel. It offers them free scope for their 
intellectual life, but it rusts the mainspring of 
their intellect. It holds out happiness for their 
families, and does its best to ruin them. It as- 
sures them of security, and makes them camp 
among enemies. It increases their sense of 
strength by surrounding them with inferiors, and 



ITS PERILS 59 

thereby relaxes their virility. It forces leader- 
ship on them, and yet chills the love of the people 
which is the condition of all leadership. It seems 
to win all the powers of this world to their side, 
but it puts them on the wrong side in the final 
verdict of God, of humanity, and of their own 
souis. That is the tragedy of Dives. 

If the privileged class have their " tragedy 
of Dives," which they cannot escape, we may 
be sure that the rule of the proletariat would 
have another tragedy of its own. For if there 
are any moral laws at all, selfishness, wherever 
found, carries in itself a seed of death. So 
that a purely class-selfish revolution would 
finally betray its own creators. But the way 
to its overthrow might be a long and bloody 
way. 

The best and only final defense against a 
destructive revolution — it behooves us all to 
remember — is not force, never force, but thor- 
oughgoing justice to all men, with whatever 
radical changes in all our theories and systems 
that may be found ultimately to involve. We 
should all be getting ready for a far more 
radical democracy than the world has yet seen ; 
— especially those of us who have been among 
the more favoured in our present social order. 
For, as Kidd long ago pointed out in his Social 
Evolution, two things make for social prog- 



60 THE NEW AGE 

ress in the history of the race: the growing 
power of the unprivileged classes to seize some 
juster share in the advantages of the commu- 
nity; and the growing conviction, on the part 
of the privileged, that they themselves are not 
justly entitled to the measure of privilege they 
have had. Both these causes are now at work, 
and the war has definitely increased both. We 
have to reckon with that situation. 

In the first place, the war has demonstrated 
as never before the worth and the power of the 
common man of every race. In common jus- 
tice he has earned new rights. It is well for 
society not to forget these facts. As Professor 
Ward puts it: 

The growing power of the working class is 
beyond dispute the outstanding fact in human 
relationships. The question now is whether this 
self-conscious, self-dependent working class is 
going to seek only freedom and power for itself, 
or whether it will seek the emancipation and 
development of all humanity. 

In the second place, the war has forced many 
questions concerning the righteousness of our 
present social order upon the consciousness of 
many of us who are more or less favoured by 
that order. We may not feel ourselves very 
wise in the economic field, but we cannot per- 



ITS PERILS 6l 

suade ourselves of the decent justice of much 
that now is. The inequalities of every kind 
are too drastic. They mock us at every hand. 
Take, for example, the single fact that, before 
the war, more than one-half of the families of 
the United States had a yearly income of only 
$800, or less. It is not a question of individ- 
uals, but of a system in which we are all in- 
volved. One of our most thoughtful students 
of the social order thus expresses his own sense 
of the gravity of the situation at this point: 

The capitalist order has yet to face the con- 
science of mankind when the common intelligence 
has fully grasped the significance of the fact that 
in every nation war profits far exceeded those of 
peace, that the war occasioned the greatest in- 
crease of private fortunes ever known. This fact 
fully reveals the moral nature of a system which 
makes profits even out of death and dishonour, 
which capitalizes the supreme tragedy of the 
world as it capitalizes its laughter and its joy, 
which proposes to draw interest forever on the 
millions of youth who now lie in the battle-fields 
of Europe when they might be helping to make 
a new world. 

Along with this fact must be put another. Of 
the several forces which operated to defeat the 
hope of those who saw a new international order 
coming out of the war, not the least was the 
unconscious influence of the present financial 



62 THE NEW AGE 

system and the actual intrigues of its chief manip- 
ulators and beneficiaries. On the one hand was 
the predatory attitude of nations whose economic 
life is organized around the principle of aggres- 
sion, whose leaders were face to face with the 
necessity of answering to the common people 
for the promises they had made concerning the 
benefits to be derived from victory. On the other 
hand was the need of collecting the interest on 
international debts and maintaining the sanctity 
of the right of the money lender to have his 
pound of flesh. To these two necessities the 
interests of humanity were sacrificed. [Ward, 
The New Social Order, p. 367.] 

The adequate solution here is not easy to 
find; but we can be perfectly certain that sim- 
ply going on in the age-long conventional way 
to add to the burdens of the masses of the 
people is no solution at all, and only invites 
revolution. 



LECTURE III 
THE NEW AGE: ITS VALUES 



LECTURE III 

THE NEW AGE: ITS VALUES 

REAL and great as are the perils which 
confront us in the new age, and im- 
perative as it is squarely to face them, 
they constitute, after all, only one side of the 
world situation. For there are also great 
values to be counted upon, and to be used to 
the full. And we may include under these 
values of the new age all the forces which may 
help to that great advance, that ought to follow 
from the war: the values involved in the out- 
standing characteristics of the present world- 
order; the moral demonstrations of the war, 
as they bear on the continued progress of the 
race; and the most significant ideal achieve- 
ments of the war. 

I 

The Values Involved in the Characteristics of 

the Present World-Order 

We are first to consider the helpful trends 

involved in the outstanding characteristics of 

65 



66 THE NEW AGE 

the present world-order. Of these character- 
istic world phenomena, two — the war's de- 
structive use of modern science, and the rela- 
tively new relentless immoral philosophy of the 
State and of national life — are utterly hostile 
to a truly Christian civilization, and have been 
already dealt with. 

Three others — world solidarity; the pro- 
digiously increased resources of power and 
wealth and knowledge made possible through 
modern science; and the forced cooperation — 
are ambiguous in their character. For, as the 
war has shown, they may be used for good or 
evil. They are problems for the ideal interests 
to solve, powerful forces to be mastered. And 
yet they are all so readily usable for good that 
they may be unhesitatingly classed among the 
great helpful trends of the age. 

The four others named — the world-wide 
trend toward democracy and universal educa- 
tion ; the establishment of a League of Nations 
to enforce peace, even granting its limitations ; 
the steadily growing internationalism ; and the 
deepening sense of the necessity of a larger and 
more significant goal for social progress — we 
may believe will positively help to a more 
Christian civilization, to a new epoch for hu- 
manity. 

1. First of all, there is a constantly intensi- 



ITS VALUES 67 

fying world solidarity. Men are called to live 
a world-life as never before, for the world is 
increasingly one. Improved methods of trans- 
portation and communication — no one of them 
more than one hundred years old — have in- 
sured it. We are habituated to migrations, 
compared to which great historic racial migra- 
tions were insignificant. The races are min- 
gled in a way that intensifies all race problems. 
The spread of Western civilization all over the 
world has forced in no small degree both a 
commercial and an intellectual solidarity, 
bringing everywhere the challenge of the scien- 
tific spirit and of some measure of the social 
consciousness. The press is making men at 
remote distances think and feel together. 
Wireless telegraphy and wireless telephony 
give promise of the day when all men shall be 
in touch with one another the world over. 
Life has a complexity of relations not to be 
escaped. 

The war so demonstrated this solidarity of 
the world as to have compelled America to 
abandon its settled policy of isolated neutrality, 
and to champion the cause of the Allies in its 
larger aspects as unmistakably its own cause. 

This growing solidarity, too, and the sense 
of it have been greatly intensified by the events 
of the war. The war has proved the oneness 



68 THE NEW AGE 

of the earth's life. We cannot escape it, try 
as we will. Henceforth, nothing significant 
can occur anywhere and not affect the whole 
world. From now on all peoples are visibly 
members one of another. 

While this gives immense possible power to 
the forces of evil, it gives a like power to the 
forces of good, and the consciousness of soli- 
darity can hardly help sobering the passion of 
selfishness, and the closer fellowship involved 
can hardly help creating a better understanding 
among the nations. Now, if this solidarity of 
the world is mastered by the forces of right- 
eousness, then we may look forward to a life 
larger, more complex, richer, more significant 
than men have ever yet known, — a life to 
which all races and nations shall contribute 
their best. For, of that new City of God, it 
could then be truly said: " They shall bring 
the glory and honour of the nations into it." 
For such a mastered and glorified world-soli- 
darity we may hope: for it we must be ready. 

2. In the second place, through the growth 
of modern science, there has been in the last 
century a prodigious increase in the world's 
resources of pozver and zvealth and knozvledge, 
constituting again a great challenge to the 
moral and religious forces. That these re- 
sources were far greater than men thought, 



ITS VALUES 69 

and that they can be used for the most hideous 
wrong, this war clearly demonstrated. And it 
was not less a demonstration, that unless civ- 
ilization itself is to come to an end the world 
must learn to bring these resources under 
moral control. The very power of these re- 
sources both for good and evil forced the war 
upon the race, and its issues will not be finally 
settled except through a reassertion of the 
moral mastery of all resources and forces. To 
be true to that requirement will demand stern 
self- judgment on the part of all the nations. 

Yet modern science has enormous help to 
offer to the forces of righteousness through the 
wealth and power made available by its pro- 
gressive conquest over nature, and especially 
through the application of the scientific spirit 
and method in both world-wide and intensified 
and concentrated surveys for the sake of the 
social, moral and religious progress of the race. 
For good intention, moral indignation and so- 
cial passion, imperative as they are, in them- 
selves solve nothing. In complex and difficult 
times like these we need a conscience enlight- 
ened as well as sensitive; a will that not only 
means well but is willing patiently to study and 
obey the laws of the universe of God in which 
we are called to realize our righteous purposes. 

3. In the third place, forced scientific CO- 



70 THE NEW AGE 

operation and organization, already becoming 
characteristic of the world-order before the 
war, were during the war carried out on a 
scale and to a degree never before seen. The 
very solidarity of the world implies it. The 
exigencies of the war forced cooperation to a 
far greater extent, both on the individual bel- 
ligerents and on groups of belligerents. The 
degree to which we must cooperate, whether 
we will or no, was to be seen, too, in the way 
in which the belligerents even in war applied 
the results of the scientific work of their ene- 
mies. And the lessons of the war are certain 
to compel on the part of individual nations, in 
the stern conditions following the war, rational 
co-working on a scale never before prevailing 
in times of peace. 

There has even occurred what Mr. Wells 
has called " a demilitarization of war." The 
dependence in the war upon engineers of every 
sort, upon railroad operators and commercial 
organizers and food directors and providers is 
all evidence of this demilitarization. This 
seems to promise for the future " not so much 
the conversion of men into soldiers as the so- 
cialization of the economic organization of the 
country with a view to both national and inter- 
national necessities. We do not want to turn 
a chemist or a photographer into a little figure 



ITS VALUES 71 

like a lead soldier, moving mechanically at the 
word of command, but we do want to make his 
chemistry or photography swiftly available if 
the national organization is called upon to 
fight. We have discovered that the modern 
economic organization is in itself a fighting 
machine." This has a real element of encour- 
agement in it, for it suggests that where the 
needs of peace are completely provided for 
there is already comparative preparedness for 
the necessities of war. 

4. A fourth characteristic of this changing 
world-order is the unmistakable almost world- 
wide trend toward democracy and universal 
education. Every nation, even in Asia, except 
Afghanistan, is living under some form of 
constitution. China, with its immense terri- 
tory and population, has become republican, 
even if unstably so. The Russian revolution, 
in spite of the grave anxieties it now stirs, was 
a prodigious achievement in itself and pro- 
phetic of great changes elsewhere. Even 
Japan, which followed so closely the Prussian 
model in her government, has made real prog- 
ress toward a more democratic policy. Of the 
general democratic gains of the war Mr. 
Hoover has this to say : 

We went into the war to destroy autocracy as 



72 THE NEW AGE 

a menace to our own and all other democracies. 
If we had not come into the war every inch of 
European soil to-day would be under autocratic 
government. . . . Out of this victory has 
come the destruction of the four great autoc- 
racies in Germany, Russia, Turkey and Austria 
and the little autocracy in Greece. New democ- 
racies have sprung into being in Poland, Finland, 
Letvia, Lithuania, Esthonia, Czecho-Slovakia, 
Greater Serbia, Greece, Siberia, and even Ger- 
many and Austria have established democratic 
governments. Beyond these a host of small re- 
publics, such as Armenia, Georgia, Azerbaijan 
and others, have sprung up, and again as a result 
of this great world movement the constitutions 
of Spain, Rumania, and even England, have 
made a final ascent to complete franchise and 
democracy, although they still maintain a symbol 
of royalty. . . . The world to-day, except 
for a comparatively few reactionary and com- 
munistic autocracies, is democratic. 



Everywhere the war still bids fair, with sim- 
ple justice, to extend the suffrage and the 
recognition of the rights of the common people 
among all the belligerents. Situations incon- 
sistent with an essentially democratic view- 
point men more and more feel are not to be 
defended, even where permitted. 

Now this democratic trend has certainly 
been greatly strengthened by the war, for the 



ITS VALUES 73 

war has brought both a new sense of power to 
the common man himself, and a new faith in 
him. Both facts inevitably mean a more thor- 
oughgoing democracy if ultimate revolution is 
to be avoided. Involved in this trend toward 
democracy, too, it is plain, is a growing empha- 
sis on equality, the deep significance of which 
it is folly to deny or to ignore. In words al- 
ready quoted, " the growing power of the 
working class is beyond dispute the outstand- 
ing fact in human relationships." 

5. The definite establishment of a League 
of Nations, with a Covenant — whatever its 
limitations — conceived in a spirit unmatched in 
any similar political document, constitutes an- 
other evidence of a new age. For unless hu- 
manity is going insane, it will find some way — 
in spite of America's present opposition — to an 
effective league of nations, to lift the intoler- 
able burden of ever increasing armaments, and 
to put a stop to suicidal world conflicts. There 
has been, it seems to me, an unpardonable 
cynicism respecting the League of Nations on 
the part of party politicians, and some idealists. 
And the company in which the idealists find 
themselves ought to make them suspect their 
premises. 

In the first place, as William James reminds 
us, " all goods are disguised by the vulgarity 



74 THE NEW AGE 

of their concomitants, in this workaday 
world ; but woe to him who can recognize them 
only when he thinks them in their pure and ab- 
stract form." Too many were demanding 
from the start a degree of perfection in the 
League not to be expected. No doubt the 
treaty knit up with the Covenant of the League 
of Nations was not perfect. I have already 
spoken of the disillusionment arising from the 
selfish scramble of the nations. But there is 
another side to the matter. The treaty-makers 
for the Allies faced a very difficult situation. 
For all future world peace, the treaty must be 
such that it should be plain both to Germany 
and to the world that Germany had not 
profited by the war. And yet Germany had 
deliberately started the war, had had no war 
on her own soil except in East Prussia, had in- 
vaded at once territory it had covenanted to 
respect, had carried through the war its fearful 
doctrine of f rightfulness, had viciously waged 
a war intended to crush Belgium and France 
economically, and had shown little or no peni- 
tence for any of these things. These and simi- 
lar facts need to be borne in mind, when men 
criticize the treaty. 

Moreover, the calling of the Peace Confer- 
ence itself was no small achievement, and the 
Conference was at its best in the consideration 



ITS VALUES 75 

of the Covenant of the League. Let one read 
again that Covenant and compare it with any 
previous similar document growing out of 
other wars. The essential thing was to get the 
League started. It was capable of amendment 
as men went on in its practical use. If Amer- 
ica had come in with any reasonable reserva- 
tions, a great achievement would have been 
possible. With America's prompt cooperation 
the League was capable of becoming the one 
greatest gain of the war, aside from the simple 
military defeat of the Germans. What prac- 
ticable substitute do the partisan and idealist 
opponents of the League propose? What 
promise is there in simply washing our hands 
of Europe? The spirit of cooperation, of 
mutual sacrifice, of passionate desire for per- 
manent peace, could all be carried to their le- 
gitimate fulfillment only in such a League. 
America, it is to be feared, will have much to 
answer for, in its dire maiming of the League 
of Nations. 

We may hope, however, that America will 
still find some way to share in the great possi- 
bilities of an effective League of Nations, in 
line with the forecast of the Manchester 
Guardian: 

What matters far more than that America 



76 THE NEW AGE 

should take an active part in settling the terms 
of peace for Hungary, Bulgaria, and Turkey is 
that she should become an effective member of 
the League of Nations whose task will be the 
pacification of the world hereafter. For this her 
cooperation, if not absolutely essential, is of the 
deepest importance, not so much because of her 
wealth and power as because of her comparative 
disinterestedness and singleness of aim. Nothing 
is more certain than that the arrangements now 
made or about to be made in Europe and the Near 
East cannot stand. They have about them no 
element of permanence, because they are based 
on no large and humane principle. They are 
mainly the compromises of national interest and 
ambition. It follows that in no long time the 
whole of these arrangements will have to be 
largely revised and the treaties rewritten. It is 
here that the cooperation of America would be 
invaluable, and there is nothing in her present 
attitude of aloofness which need prevent her 
from then playing a free and powerful part. 

As to the League itself, we may well remind 
ourselves of Lord Grey's words: " The success 
of the League rests with the people, who can 
make their Governments what they will." 
Even in its present lessened power, we may 
still share Dr. Clifford's joy: " The League is 
a fact, the greatest fact of the hour, and the 
greatest fact history records. The Tribunal is 
created. This is the victory for brotherhood ! " 



ITS VALUES 77 

6. But independently of a League of Na- 
tions to Enforce Peace, a steadily growing in- 
ternationalism is both manifest and inevitable, 
as developing out of all the characteristics of 
the age already mentioned. It is vain to at- 
tempt in selfish isolation to withstand it. One 
of the ablest of British Divines thus sums up 
this growing internationalism: 

The international is the dominating conception 
of the relations of men to men. A new con- 
sciousness,^ new mind, has entered the soul of the 
world. . . . The domestic prepares for the 
civic and the civic for the national; and the na- 
tional is on the way to the international and real- 
izes itself in and through the international. 
Brotherhood is like the air, universal and unescap- 
able. It besets us behind and before, and lays its 
quickening and uplifting hand upon us. The 
world is being made " all clear " for its march. 
" Labour " has long been international. " Peace " 
movements are world-wide. The Temperance 
Crusade assails all barriers and will beat them 
down. The legislators of different countries meet 
in conference to harmonize laws. Even the 
churches are developing international relations 
and preparing for world congresses ; and I cannot 
doubt that the movements for unity will slough 
the obsolete accretions of the past and unite the 
religions of the world so that Humanity shall 
become one flock under one Shepherd. 



78 THE NEW AGE 

Bertrand Russell thus emphasizes one par- 
ticular incentive to internationalism: 

The war has made it clear that it is impossible 
to produce a secure integration of the life of a 
single community while the relations between 
civilized countries are governed by aggressive- 
ness and suspicion. For this reason any really 
powerful movement of reform will have to be in- 
ternational. 

7. But the most noteworthy evidence of a 
genuinely new age, among these characteris- 
tics of the changing world-order, is the grow- 
ing sense that the new age cannot mean simply 
a little better distribution of things among men, 
but the taking on of a larger and more signifi- 
cant goal than organized humanity have ever 
before cherished. Labour and social pro- 
grams, preeminently the British Labour Pro- 
gram, — in the very midst of economic de- 
mands — bear witness to this growing sense, 
that life is more than meat. Not only indi- 
viduals here and there but whole groups and 
classes are making this larger claim on life. 
Two typical men — Bertrand Russell and Harry 
F. Ward — getting at their problem from quite 
different points of view, may be instanced, as 
still both voicing the instinctive longings of 
multitudes, in their insistence on larger and 



ITS VALUES 79 

more significant goals for organized human 
life. 

Russell puts the matter thus: 

It is not only more material goods that men 
need, but more freedom, more self-direction, more 
outlet for creativeness, more opportunity for the 
joy of life, more voluntary cooperation, and less 
involuntary subservience to purposes not their 
own. All these things the institutions of the fu- 
ture must help to produce, if our increase of 
knowledge and power over Nature is to bear its 
full fruit in bringing about a good life. 

And he strikes a still deeper note, when he 
writes : 

Life devoted only to life is animal, without 
any real human value, incapable of preserving 
men permanently from weariness and the feeling 
that all is vanity. If life is to be fully human it 
must serve some end which seems, in some sense, 
outside human life, some end which is impersonal 
and above mankind, such as God or truth or 
beauty. 

Professor Ward almost summarizes his whole 
treatment of The Nezv Social Order, in his 
similar expression of the goal of social activity: 

It is becoming manifest that the development 
of personality is to supersede the acquisition of 
goods as the goal of social activity, and that the 



80 THE NEW AGE 

fullest development of personality is to be found 
in the effort to realize the solidarity of the human 
family. 

These statements of both men — we shall 
later see — are fundamentally in harmony with 
that basic and supreme principle of reverence 
for personality which is both psychologically 
and religiously grounded and a natural guiding 
principle in our inquiry. 

II 

The Help of the Moral Demonstrations of 
the War 

From these values involved in the outstand- 
ing characteristics of the present world-order, 
we turn to the help that may come from the 
moral demonstrations of the war as they bear 
on the continued progress of the race. After 
a war of so extraordinary a character, in the 
midst of days of such significance as these 
after-the-war days, no thoughtful man can 
help asking: " What has this most terrible of 
zvars taught us? " Some things have been 
demonstrated as by the finger of God Himself. 

First of all, the war has demonstrated that 
we must get rid of shallow views of progress, 
of creed, and of morals. 

We must get rid of shallow views of prog- 
ress. If anything has been made plain in the 



ITS VALUES 8l 

anguish of this world experience, it is that 
progress will not take care of itself. The 
Victorian generation, in its enthusiasm over 
the new outlook upon the universe afforded by 
the theory of evolution, not unnaturally and 
more or less unconsciously assumed that evolu- 
tion carried progress necessarily with it. 

But when one makes clear to himself how 
nearly Germany came to, at least, an immedi- 
ate success; and how terrible was the strain 
upon the whole of Western civilization in meet- 
ing through these years the German onset, he 
does not need to be told that progress is not a 
thing to be left to the inevitable course of 
events; that the very meaning of human his- 
tory is that the attitude of men themselves is 
the decisive factor in all worth-while progress ; 
that progress worthy of the race requires the 
steady loyalty of truth-loving, freedom-loving 
men and women, who forever and forever are 
" staying on the job." 

Any progress worthy of the name, we may 
never forget, involves great moral conditions, 
and there is no evading of these laws of the 
universe. The man or the nation who will not 
fulfill these great moral conditions will find 
himself fighting against the universe of God. 
" He that falleth on this stone shall be broken 
to pieces; but on whomsoever it shall fall it 



82 THE NEW AGE 

will scatter him as dust." First of all, there- 
fore, let every thoughtful man and nation 
carry out of this war a deep conviction that 
progress will not take care of itself. 

And the war has been proving not less cer- 
tainly that we must get rid of shallozv viezvs of 
creed as well. For if we have been saying to 
ourselves, that it does not make much differ- 
ence what a man or a nation thinks, what their 
theory of society is, what philosophy of life 
they hold, that view surely should be no longer 
possible for this generation. For this war may 
well be said to be in its entirety the logical re- 
sult of the German philosophy of the State. 
Primarily, indeed, we were not fighting the 
German Government, even the German mili- 
tary power ; but, as we have seen, the German 
philosophy of the State — that holds that the 
State is superior to all moral obligations, that 
upon it lies no duty of any kind except to seek 
its own selfish interests. Belgium, Serbia, 
Armenia and Russia demonstrate for all time 
the terrible possibilities of this false philosophy. 

It thus mightily concerns the human race 
what a nation's creed is, what theory of society 
it holds, what philosophy of life it is practis- 
ing. 

In the process of this war, too, God has been 
burning into the consciousness of this genera- 



ITS VALUES 83 

tion some elementary and basic lessons in 
morals. We must get rid of shallow views of 
morals. This generation ought to know, as 
no generation has ever known, the true mean- 
ing of three things in morals — selfishness, arro- 
gance, and falseness. 

For, first of all, if we have been saying to 
ourselves that it does not make much differ- 
ence whether a man or a nation is selfish or 
not, that delusion should surely now have van- 
ished. If one wants to know to what his own 
selfishness, or that of his own nation, is akin; 
if he wishes to know what selfishness — pure, 
unadulterated, unashamed, and unlimited — 
truly means; if he would see once for all the 
meanness, the treachery, the sordidness, the 
hideousness, the devilishness of selfishness; he 
might have read it revealed to every sense and 
faculty of man on the very face of desolated 
Belgium, Northern France, and Armenia. For 
there were written the natural and inevitable 
consequences of a national selfishness that had 
no scruple and no thought or care for any 
other interests than its own, and that gloried in 
its shame. So that von Tirpitz could say: 
" It must be stated that it is not wrong but 
right that has been done in Belgium." So 
terrible a thing is selfishness. 

So, too, if it had seemed to any of us a 



84 THE NEW AGE 

matter of small consequence that a man or a 
nation should be conceited and arrogant, this 
world-war should forever be a demonstration 
of the infinite power for evil which arrogance 
possesses. For it was a terrible and insensate 
pride which made it possible for Germany to 
persuade herself that it was quite proper and 
right that her domination should be absolute, 
and the interests of all others sacrificed to her. 
Desolated Belgium is the logical result of such 
pride. How characteristic of the arrogance, 
in which, as Harrison said, the German people 
have been schooled, is this statement of 
Haeckel, and how fiendish its applications: 
" One single highly-cultured German warrior 
represents a higher intellectual and moral life- 
value than hundreds of the raw children of 
nature whom England and France, Russia, and 
Italy uphold to-day." 

The German treatment of Belgium, and later 
of distracted Russia, was, once more, a moral 
demonstration not only of the falseness and 
utter untrustworthiness of the German Gov- 
ernment, but also of the inevitable logical con- 
sequences of such falseness in its effect on the 
relations of men to each other. The long un- 
broken record of unexampled cruelty in Bel- 
gium is the direct result of the refusal of a 
great nation to count its plighted word as of 



ITS VALUES 85 

any value. No decent civilization is possible 
without truth and trust between men and be- 
tween nations. 

Let all men and all nations take it to heart 
that German selfishness, German arrogance, 
and German falseness bore their inevitable 
fruit in this hell let loose upon earth, not be- 
cause they were German, but because they were 
exactly what they were — selfishness, arrogance, 
and falseness. It was precisely against these 
that Christ set Himself. No sound life in 
any nation or group of nations can be built 
upon that foundation. " The healing of the 
nations " can lie only in unselfish good-will, in 
willingness to learn and to serve, in utter truth. 
This has been demonstrated. 

2. The grip of the lazvs of God upon 
Nations. 

This necessity for getting rid of shallow 
views of progress, of creed, and of morals has 
only given illustrations of another of the out- 
standing demonstrations of the war — the in- 
escapable grip of the laws of God upon the life 
of nations as well as of individuals. For in 
all the inevitable connections of progress, of 
creed, and of morals, is to be seen the grip of 
God's laws. 

If it seemed to us at any time in this world- 
strife that God had forgotten the world, and 



86 THE NEW AGE 

left the powers of evil to conquer, we might 
have laid aside all such fears. For God, we 
may be sure, is in the very laws of His uni- 
verse, and constantly working through them to 
the accomplishment of His great aims. Wher- 
ever there has been violation of the funda- 
mental laws of the universe, there penalty has 
fallen and will still fall. No man, no nation 
can finally evade or trick the laws of the uni- 
verse. As surely as the farmer cannot cheat 
the soil, so surely every man, every class, every 
nation will reap according to the sowing. And 
if it seemed to any of us in the war that Ger- 
many was too often having it all her own way, 
we may be perfectly certain that Germany's 
own record in this war is, on the contrary, an 
unmistakable demonstration of the grip of the 
laws of God upon the life of nations. 

Twenty-five years ago, in spite of factors in 
her life, which men could not approve, and 
partly misled by the German propaganda it- 
self, thousands of men of all nations were turn- 
ing to Germany for education, and were giving 
to Germany an admiration and even an affec- 
tion beyond her real desert. Men were ready 
to recognize in her the educational, scientific, 
and musical leader of the world. Is it a good 
thing for her that in this war, and in the long 
preparation for it, she put her admirers and 



ITS VALUES 87 

lovers to shame, and did all that the most fiend- 
ish ingenuity could devise to drive out of their 
hearts every last bit of admiration and love ? 

Well might one, whose lines show that he 
has both known and loved his Germany, and 
must hope that she will return to sanity and to 
her own best self, write in Punch of "A Lost 
Land "— 

A childhood land of mountain ways, 
Where earthy gnomes and forest fays, 
Kind, foolish giants, gentle bears, 
Sport with the peasant as he fares 
Affrighted through the forest glades, 
And lead sweet, wistful little maids 
Lost in the woods, forlorn, alone, 
To princely lovers and a throne. 

****** 
Dear haunted land of gorge and glen, 
Ah, me ! the dreams, the dreams of men ! 

A learned land of wise old books 
And men with meditative looks, 
Who move in quaint red-gabled towns 
And sit in gravely folded gowns, 
Divining in deep-laden speech 
The world's supreme arcana — each 
A homely god to listening Youth 
Eager to tear the veil of Truth ; 
****** 

Mild votaries of book and pen — 
Alas, the dreams, the dreams of men ! 



88 THE NEW AGE 

A music land, whose life is wrought 
In movements of melodious thought ; 
In symphony, great wave on wave — 
Or fugue, elusive, swift, and grave; 
A singing land, whose lyric rimes 
Float on the air like village chimes; 
Music and verse — the deepest part 
Of a whole nation's thinking heart! 
******* 

Oh land of Now, oh land of then ! 

Dear God ! the dreams, the dreams of men ! 

Slave nation in a land of hate, 
Where are the things that made you great? 
Child-hearted once — oh, deep defiled, 
Dare you look now upon a child? 
Your lore — a hideous mask wherein 
Self-worship hides its monstrous sin ; 
Music and verse, divinely wed — 
How can these live where love is dead? 
******* 

Oh, depths beneath sweet human ken, 
God help the dreams, the dreams of men ! 

How dire is Germany's loss at this point is 
vividly suggested by the words of Mr. Otto 
Kahn, the well-known Jewish banker of New 
York, to German-born citizens in the United 
States— 

We men of German descent have a special 
reckoning to make with Kaiserism. The world 
has been wronged and hurt by Prussianized 



ITS VALUES 89 

Germany as it was never wronged and hurt be- 
fore. But the deepest hurt of all is that which 
has been done to us. Our spiritual inheritance 
has been stolen, wrenched from us by impious 
hands and thrown in the gutter. The ideals and 
traditions we cherished have been foully be- 
smirched; our blood has been dishonoured; we 
have been bitterly shamed by our kith and kin. 
The land to which we were linked by fond mem- 
ories has become an outcast among the nations, 
convicted of high treason against civilization 
and of unspeakable crimes against humanity. 

Has ever nation known such moral isolation 
as is now hers? The completeness of her col- 
lapse and of her present disintegration is the 
inevitable penalty of violation of eternal moral 
laws. 

Ill 

The Greatest Ideal Achievements of the War 
When one is thinking of the moral demon- 
strations of the war, and of the great values, 
which must be carried on into the new age, he 
certainly may not leave out of account its 
greatest ideal achievements which may be said, 
I think, to be these — the rare idealism with 
which America came into the war ; men's deep- 
ening conviction of the supremacy of the in- 
tangible values; voluntary cooperation in a 
great cause on an unheard-of scale ; the largest 



90 THE NEW AGE 

measure of the spirit of sacrifice the world has 
ever seen ; and the resulting new revelation of 
common men. 

1. I have already spoken of the rare ideal- 
ism with zvhich America came into the war as 
one of the causes of the disillusionment that 
later befell. But here I remind you of it as 
the highest accomplishment of our national 
history and a perpetual challenge to us for the 
years to come to be true to our own best vision. 

It is no jingoist but a sober American his- 
torical scholar who wrote: 

After all did a nation ever before in the world's 
history enter a conflict only because it loathed 
the principles and despised the conduct of another 
nation — solely because of moral indignation? 

And Mr. Balfour called our entry into the war, 
" the most magnanimous and generous act in 
history." Bergson bore personal testimony to 
the spirit shown in America at that time: 

Yes, I was a witness of this spectacle unique in 
history, a people of nearly a hundred millions of 
souls throwing themselves into the war with all 
their forces, all their resources, consenting in 
advance to every sacrifice, doing this, be it under- 
stood, entirely without any impulsion of self- 
defense, for there were hardly a thousand per- 



ITS VALUES 91 

sons in the United States, five hundred, even, who 
would admit that Germany might be a danger for 
the United States. Moreover, this was done en- 
tirely without the impulse due to material ad- 
vantage, for from the outset the Americans re- 
fused all compensation, and one of their generals 
said to me last year, " We will return with empty 
hands, taking with us only our dead." They 
came with no designing aim, stirred neither by 
interest nor fear, but by a principle, by an idea, 
by the thought of the mission they were called 
upon to fulfill in the world. I was there, and I 
saw the rising of that great tide of almost re- 
ligious emotion which bore away the American 
people." [Henri Bergson, " French Ideals in 
Education and the American Student " in The 
Living Age, Dec. 27, 19 19.] 

So fine, so united and so unselfish was our 
national spirit in that high day that one of our 
poets seemed to us to be accurately reflecting 
that spirit when she wrote: 

A nation goes adventuring, 

With heart that will not quail; 

A nation goes adventuring, 
To seek the Holy Grail. 

A nation leaves its money-bags, 

Its firesides, safe and warm, 
To ride about the windy world, 

And keep the weak from harm. 



92 THE NEW AGE 

A nation goes adventuring, 
With heart that will not quail, 

God grant it, on some hard-won dawn, 
Sight of the Holy Grail. 

[" America, 1917-1918," by Mary Carolyn 
Davies.] 

If these lines seem to us now a bit exagger- 
ated, let us make sure that it is not because we 
ourselves have fallen away from the high spirit 
of which we found ourselves then capable. 
The glory of that idealism we must not fail to 
carry over into the new age. 

2. A second of these great ideal achieve- 
ments of the war was this, that, in an age we 
have called materialistic, the world has dis- 
closed a new and steadily deepening conviction, 
on the part of men in all parts of the earth, of 
the supremacy of the intangible values. It 
should mean much to all believers in the ideal 
that more millions of men than ever before, 
under the tutelage of the German menace, came 
clearly to see that force and machinery and 
organization and wealth and even science — all 
put together — are not enough ; that a man or a 
nation may have all these and still have 116 life 
worth living; but, on the contrary, may be a 
curse to the race. 

Something like three- fourths of the popula- 
tion of the globe have been knit up in some 



ITS VALUES 93 

fashion with the cause of the Allies, not for 
territorial gains, not for commercial aggran- 
dizement, not for purposes of political domina- 
tion, but because they came to see as never be- 
fore that all possible material advances with- 
out essential liberty do but furnish forth a 
barren life. This is the significance of the 
fact that little Central American countries like 
Guatamala, and Governments like Cuba and 
Liberia, declared themselves for the Allies. It 
became finally clear to them that no material 
gains — such as Germany counted as alone 
vital — can ever make good the heritage of free 
men: freedom of conscience, freedom of wor- 
ship, freedom of thought, freedom of investiga- 
tion; political, economic, social freedom — the 
emancipation of all the powers of men. They 
awakened, thus, to the supremacy of the in- 
tangible values. They caught the vision of 
the things that, though they be not seen, are 
yet eternal — the supreme and everlasting values 
of faith, of hope, of love. 

This is a great racial achievement, and a 
great possible spiritual asset, for which men 
should be endlessly grateful. In the degree in 
which that achievement can be maintained, a 
new day for the world will have dawned. 

3. The third great achievement of the war 
was that, under its pressure, the peoples who 



94 THE NEW AGE 

were really seeking a free society of self-re- 
specting and mutually-respecting nations were 
driven to such far-reaching cooperation and 
companionship in a great unselfish cause as the 
world had never before seen. The resources 
of credit, of food, of shipping, of man-power 
of three-fourths of the world were in large 
measure pooled to establish the great aims of 
the Allies. Something like a unified Council 
of all these peoples was made possible — an 
actual and potent internationalism, a " super- 
nationalism " indeed, that holds the one great 
promise for the world's future peace and 
progress. 

To paraphrase the New Republic's statement 
at an earlier period of the war; We witnessed 
the creation of a super-national control of the 
world's necessities. The men who were 
charged with conducting the war were com- 
pelled to think as international statesmen. The 
old notions of sovereignty no longer governed 
the facts. Three of the unifying forces of 
mankind were at work — hunger, danger, and 
a great hope. They swept into the scrap heap 
the separatist theories that nations should be 
self-sufficing economically, and absolutely in- 
dependent politically. A new and more power- 
ful machinery of internationalism was created. 
And it was a true internationalism, because it 



ITS VALUES 95 

dealt not with dynastic and diplomatic alli- 
ances, but with the cooperative control of those 
vital supplies on which human life depends. 

Cooperation on such a scale and for such 
ends may well send a thrill through any man 
who can think, and certainly opens up the 
vision of a new world. For here was actual- 
ized a kind of " parliament of man," a great 
world unity of the free nations who seek, and 
must continue to seek, the triumph of freedom, 
of justice and of peace for all the peoples of 
the entire world. 

If cooperation like this for great unselfish 
aims may be secured in time of war, surely we 
need not be without hope even yet of the estab- 
lishment of a permanent League of Free Na- 
tions in time of peace. For, as President Wil- 
son said, in presenting to the Peace Conference 
the draft of the League of Nations: 

It is not in contemplation that this should be 
merely a League to secure the peace of the 
world. It is a League which can be used in any 
international matter. That is the significance of 
the provision introduced concerning labour. 

Such a League, as President Wilson said, 
must be " a living thing," growing with the 
growth of the nations, developing to meet de- 
veloping problems — the great problems of a 



96 THE NEW AGE 

humane and scientific control of production, 
distribution, and consumption ; the problems of 
leisure, of recreation, of education, and of re- 
ligion, for the whole race of men. Here is 
opportunity for men's highest powers in days 
of peace; here a great challenge for the libera- 
tion of human energies in peaceful outlets. 

And here, in so magnificent an extension of 
cooperation among the nations, lies the only 
proper outcome for the immeasurable sacrifices 
of this war. This, too, is a great racial 
achievement, and possible spiritual asset, which 
must be carried over into the new age. 

4. And, once more, the war demonstrated 
afresh, on an unexampled scale, the capacity 
of men for sacrifice. The massive heroism of 
the common men of all the nations has made 
this fact certain. It is the simple truth to say 
that more millions of men than ever before in 
the history of the world threw themselves un- 
flinchingly into the support of a great un- 
selfish cause, ready for whatever sacrifice that 
might involve. 

The very numbers concerned are an inspira- 
tion. For it was not alone those who " went 
over the top " who shared in this sacrificial de- 
votion. No man who enlisted with any sense 
of the issues at stake could know what his en- 
listment might involve of life or death; and in 



ITS VALUES 97 

his enlistment he took his hands off himself, 
and laid that self in very deed upon the altar 
of country and humanity. In that, perhaps, 
half-blind dedication to a high unselfish cause, 
many a man found to his own surprise his life 
become marvellously simple and free. He had 
not known before that sacrifice was the way to 
liberty. 

This very spirit of sacrifice gave to millions 
of men a new sense of the great values for 
which they fought, and a new grip upon them. 
They saw things in better proportion ; the great 
values looming up as really great, and the rela- 
tive goods forced back into their relative 
places. It was " the glory of the trenches," 
as Coningsby Dawson said, that they emanci- 
pated men from selfishness and from the domi- 
nation of petty aims and fears — 

There's one person I've missed since my return 
to New York. I've caught glimpses of him dis- 
appearing around corners, but he dodges. I think 
he's a bit ashamed to meet me. That person is 
my old civilian self. What a full-blown egotist 
he used to be ! How full of golden plans for his 
own advancement ! How terrified of failure, of 
disease, of money losses, of death — of all the 
temporary, external, non-essential things that 
have nothing to do with the spirit! War is in 
itself damnable — a profligate misuse of the accu- 
mulated brainstuff of centuries. Nevertheless, 



98 THE NEW AGE 

there's many a man who has no love o£ war, who, 
previous to the war, had cramped his soul with 
littleness, and was chased by the bayonet of duty 
into the blood-stained largeness of the trenches, 
who has learned to say, " Thank God for this 
war!" He thanks God not because of the car- 
nage, but because, when the winepress of new 
ideals was being trodden, he was born in an age 
when he could do his share. 

And some such emancipation, as came to the 
men in the trenches, came in like manner to 
many soldiers and sailors who never saw the 
front; but who held themselves at home or 
abroad not less at their country's command. 
And it came surely, also, to those who waited in 
the homes for fathers and husbands, and sons 
and brothers, and bore them on their heart in 
love and prayer, and made common cause with 
them. How inevitably the home life, too, was 
exalted by the sacrifices of this war is sug- 
gested by Miss Rittenhouse in her poem, " I 
Have No Lover on the Battle-field " — 

I have no lover on the battle-field, 

I do not go with sickening fear at heart, 
And when the crier calls the latest horror 

I do not start. 
I have no lover on the battle-field, 

I am exempt from terror of the night, 
I can lie down, serene and disregarding, 

Until the light. 



ITS VALUES 99 

But on the battle-field had I a lover, 

How life would purge itself of petty pain, 
And what would matter all the petty losses, 

The petty gain ? 
I should be one with those who suffer greatly, 

With pain all pain above, 
And I should know then beyond peradventure, 

The heart of Love ! 

But the glory of the spirit of sacrifice is not 
merely that it emancipates and exalts the indi- 
vidual who feels it, but that it is contagious and 
spreads from soul to soul, and so becomes 
truly redemptive for other men also. Mr. J. J. 
Chapman had no doubt his own brilliant son in 
thought, who died earlier in the war, when he 
wrote: 

The young men, as of old, shine as the natural 
heroes of the race. Their readiness to die re- 
stores our faith in human nature. It reminds us 
that the sacrificial part is what counts in the 
spread of truth. This much we know, and we 
know little else about morality and religion. To 
count the cost and dwell upon the life and prop- 
erty sacrificed in heroic action is to doubt the 
value of truth. To what better use could these 
young heroes and all this amassed wealth have 
been put? It was for this that they existed. 

The spirit of sacrifice not only involves, thus, 
the uplift of high companionship in the fulfill- 



IOO THE NEW AGE 

ment of great aims; but its unwonted preva- 
lence means also that more millions of men, 
than ever before in the history of the world, 
have found in their own sacrificial experience 
the key to the understanding of the deepest 
message of religion, of Christianity, of Christ's 
own death — the message of sacrifice. Men 
have come to see in some half-blind fashion 
the meaning of sacrifice; that they can in some 
true sense do what Hinton long ago pointed 
out — make all their pains " identify themselves 
in meaning, and end with the suffering of 
Christ. ,, For when one turns all his pains 
into a willing sacrifice to God and to men, he 
makes the sacrifice itself, " an instrument of 
joy " — for love rejoices in sacrifices for love's 
sake. 

In the midst of all the drear monotony and 
drudgery of much of the war, in commonplace 
tasks that did not easily take on any glamour 
or glory of war, in mud and squalor and 
wretchedness and disease, every man still had 
his place in the huge sacrificial task, and of- 
fered his life for the triumph of liberty, of 
democracy, of righteousness in the earth. 
Surely that cannot happen for millions of men, 
and the world be not better worth living in 
hereafter. One does not wonder that one of 
the English chaplains was able to say that the 



ITS VALUES IOI 

favourite hymn of the London regiments, at 
the long gruelling battle of the Somme, was 
Watts' old Good Friday hymn — 

When I survey the wondrous cross, 
On which the Prince of Glory died, 

My richest gain I count but loss, 
And pour contempt on all my pride. 

Here again was a great racial achievement, 
and a great possible spiritual asset, which above 
all the Christian forces must make the very 
spirit of the new age. 

5. Through all these great ideal achieve- 
ments of the war, already surveyed, another 
came, — the resulting new revelation of common 
men. For if millions of men shared in that 
rare idealism with which America entered the 
war; if they awakened to a new sense of the 
supremacy of intangible values; if they arose 
to the demands of cooperative tasks unmatched 
in history; if they showed an unbelievable 
capacity for sacrifice ; then in all this, there was 
involved a new revelation of common men, that 
should mean also a new faith in God and His 
universe. 

We that have seen man broken, 
We know man is divine. 

In the face of such scientific terrors as the 



102 THE NEW AGE 

world had never before seen, man's frail, 
human body by indomitable will held on its 
course. Common men of all the nations 
proved themselves capable of an endurance we 
had hardly thought possible to men, and of a 
heroism unsurpassed in the history of the 
world. 

Barbusse's novel, The Fire, was one of 
the truly great books the war gave us. It is 
significant that it could be correctly described, 
in the whole heart and sweep of it, as " an 
ardent tribute to the mute, inglorious millions 
of ordinary men constrained to heroism by 
circumstances, brave, determined, reliable, but 
not imbued with any military spirit — those mil- 
lions of uprooted civilians." 

Wells counts this common heroism one of 
the characteristic things of this war — 

It is the peculiarity of this war — it is the most 
reassuring evidence that a great increase in gen- 
eral ability and critical ability has been going on 
throughout the last century — that no isolated 
great personages have emerged. Never has there 
been so much ability, invention, inspiration, 
leadership ; but the very abundance of good qual- 
ities has prevented our focussing upon those of 
any one individual. . . . It is not that the 
war has failed to produce heroes, so much as that 
it has produced heroism in a torrent. The great 



ITS VALUES 103 

man of this war is the common man. It becomes 
ridiculous to pick out particular names. . . . 
The acts of the small men in this war dwarf all 
the pretensions of the great men. Imperatively 
these multitudinous heroes forbid the setting up 
of effigies. When I was a young man I imitated 
Swift and posed for cynicism. I will confess 
that now, at fifty, and greatly helped by this war, 
I have fallen in love with mankind. 

And this courage of the common man is 
ground, as William Allen White sees, for a 
great new faith in democracy — 

That courage — that thing which the Germans 
thought was their special gift from Heaven, bred 
of military discipline, rising out of German Kul- 
tur — we know now is the commonest heritage of 
men. It is the divine fire burning in the soul of 
us that proves the case for democracy. For at 
base and underneath we are all equals. In crises 
the rich man, the poor man, the thief, the harlot, 
the preacher, the teacher, the labourer, the ig- 
norant, the wise, all go to death for something 
that defies death — something immortal in the 
human spirit. Those truck-drivers, those mule- 
whackers, those common soldiers, that doctor, 
these college men on the ambulance, are brothers 
to-night in the democracy of courage. Upon that 
democracy is the hope of the race, for it bespeaks 
a wider and deeper kinship of men. 

So heart-breaking and yet so inspiring has 



104 THE NEW AGE 

been this massive heroism of the common rank 
and file of men, that one does not wonder that 
it has begotten a new religious faith and led 
one like H. G. Wells to say on the one hand, 
" Our sons have shown us God " ; and Dr. 
P. T. Forsyth to say on the other hand, " God 
has shown us our sons." 

Surely it were a faithless generation that, in 
the light of the revelations of this war, and in 
spite of all its sordid and brutal accompani- 
ments, should not find grounds for a new, great 
faith in common men. 



LECTURE IV 

THE NEW MIND: THE POLITICAL 
AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 



LECTURE IV 

THE NEW MIND: THE POLITICAL 
AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 

I 

General Introduction 

WE have been considering thus far the 
new age, its evidence, its perils, and 
its values. We turn now to con- 
sider the new mind needed for that new age, 
the challenge which that new age brings. That 
challenge is threefold— a challenge to recognize 
that we are in a new age, which calls for radical 
readjustments, a challenge to overcome in posi- 
tive fashion the perils of the age, and a chal- 
lenge to preserve and fulfill the values of the 
age. 

If we have been right at all in our estimate 

of the significance of the crisis through which 
the world has been passing, then it is not too 
much to say that the opportunity for the great- 
est advance the human race has ever made is 
still within our grasp. To build a new world 
107 



108 THE NEW MIND 

according to the pattern shown us in our mount 
of vision — that is the challenge, the oppor- 
tunity, " the great adventure," to which we are 
committed. 

There is a moving passage (writes another 
[Chaplain E. S. Woods in The Church in the 
Furnace]) in a moving book, John Masefield's 
" Gallipoli," where he describes how the final at- 
tack at Suvla Bay represented a kind of climax 
of effort and opportunity, led up to by infinite 
toil and sacrifice. " There was the storm, there 
was the crisis, the one picked hour, to which this 
death and agony . . . had led. Then was 
the hour for the casting off of self, and a setting 
aside of every pain and longing and sweet affec- 
tion, a giving up of all that makes a man to the 
something which makes a race, and a going for- 
ward to death resolvedly to help out their broth- 
ers high up above in the shell-bursts and the 
blazing gorse. Which is a parable as well as 
history." To all believers in the ideal and lovers 
of men, has come at last their " one picked hour," 
their supreme opportunity, their " final summons 
to fare forth with God in His Great Adventure." 

For it infinitely concerns us to see that the 
fight for a nezv world is not over, but only well 
begun. This is no time to scuttle back to old 
indulgences; it is no time for petty, private 
aims, or for narrow, selfish nationalism. For 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 109 

of nations, too, as well as of individuals, it is 
to be written in that new age: " Whosoever 
would be first among you, shall be servant of 
all." Germany's tragic failure is new proof 
of it. 

These five years of unspeakable sacrifice 
have laid their hands in solemn dedication upon 
the heads, especially of the remaining youth of 
the nations, pledging them to that further and 
continuous sacrifice — which is also the measure 
of life — that holds in itself the promise and 
potency of a new world. For this generation 
is challenged to something far greater than the 
Crusades, far greater than the French Revolu- 
tion — to a great international movement that 
deliberately takes into its plans the entire globe 
and the interests of the whole race of men. 

To make the final outcomes of this war, then, 
not less significant than the process; to make 
the gains commensurate with the sacrifices ; to 
keep keen the sense of the spiritual issues of the 
war ; to discern and obey those eternal laws of 
God, which the war has once more thundered 
forth; to carry over into the tasks of peace — 
personal, national and international — the great- 
est ideal achievements of the war: the rare 
idealism with which America came into the 
war, the sense of the supremacy of the in- 
tangible values, cooperation on an unheard-of 



IIO THE NEW MIND 

scale, the well-nigh universal spirit of sacrifice, 
and the new revelation of common men and 
common nations — this, is the neiv oath of al- 
legiance to which in this supreme hour of the 
world we are all summoned. Can we rise to 
the opportunity? 

If we are truly and fully to rise to that op- 
portunity, it will require the commitment of 
the whole man, and a many-sided national and 
international response — political, economic and 
social adjustment; educational adjustment; 
moral and religious adjustment. What can 
political, economic and social forces do to in- 
sure a better world ? What can education do ? 
What can the moral and religious forces do? 
These are our questions. 

We are to consider, first, the political, 
economic and social challenge of our times. 

To knit our discussion up most fruitfully 
with the considerations already reviewed, and 
to get as concrete and definite suggestions as 
possible for the solution of our world problem, 
let us ask ourselves at this point this specific 
question: What practically can be done in the 
way of political, economic or social changes to 
defeat the perils which threaten us, and to 
insure to us the fullest harvest — both economic 
and spiritual — from the available values of our 
time? 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE III 



The Threatening Perils of the New Age 

The threatening perils of the new age seemed 
to us to be the perils of an inevitable inherit- 
ance of evil from the war; of disillusionment, 
of reaction, and of destructive revolution. 
There is obviously no short and simple way 
of meeting those perils, and yet they are very 
real and very great. We are far from safety 
at any point. 

1. The specific dangers involved in our evil 
inheritance from the war are first to be con- 
sidered. 

Here there are, to begin with, the perils 
arising from frightful destructiveness in every 
sphere of life and the consequent perils of a 
civilization near to collapse. Both call for 
enormous constructive efforts of every kind, 
not only to make good our losses, but also defi- 
nitely to insure a better civilization. 

Then there are the perils of the infectious 
spread, through so long and terrible a war, of 
the intoxication of power; the perils of an al- 
most unavoidable approximation on the part of 
the Allies to the Prussianism they were fight- 
ing; and the resulting perils of carrying over 
into times of peace the moods and methods of 
war — in the ready appeal to force, the con- 



112 THE NEW MIND 

tempt for human life, and the persistent viola- 
tion of the liberties of a democratic state. 
These all call for a new fight for freedom, and 
for a more thoroughgoing democracy freed 
from all taint of absolutism. 

There remain, in this direct inheritance of 
evil from the war, the perils of the inevitable 
reaction from the stress and strain and excite- 
ment of the war — in wide-spread class selfish- 
ness, the lure of indolence and pleasure-hunt- 
ing; and the perils which the war had for the 
inner life of the soldier. Both these causes 
have tended to induce a general demoralization 
of life, naturally to be expected after so pro- 
found a disturbance of normal conditions, but 
all the more dangerous on that account. These 
perils can be met effectively only in the indi- 
vidual life, backed by education and the great 
motives of morals and religion, though the 
community can do much sympathetically to 
help, by making the conditions of living what 
they ought to be. 

2. As to the perils of disillusionment, in 
another's words: " The hope of a speedy world- 
reorganization founded on international justice 
and peace has vanished ; the Peace Conference 
has given us neither the Society of Nations nor 
Peace. The friends of justice are disappointed 
and disheartened." So a writer in the New 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 113 

Europe sums up that situation at Paris, out of 
which came our present disillusionment. The 
perils of disillusionment we saw are the perils 
of losing our trust in one another, of losing our 
courage and our fundamental faith. Those 
basic perils can be met only by discerning new 
grounds of hope from a larger, deeper and 
more specific survey of world conditions, and 
from moral and religious considerations. All 
that we have reviewed under the values of the 
new age has here its application, and there are 
other particular elements of promise yet to be 
noted. 

3. The perils of reaction, we saw, are the 
perils of timidity, of physical and mental in- 
dolence, of wearied and enfeebled wills, of 
despair of a forward-looking solution — all 
abetted everywhere by individual, party, and 
national selfishness. These perils can be over- 
come only by individual determination ; by dis- 
criminating education, that recognizes the need 
of both the conservative and radical instinct, 
but makes clear the imperative duty of prog- 
ress, and definitely points out at least some of 
the steps to a better age; and by a growing 
moral and religious victory over selfishness. 

4. The comprehensive peril of destructive 
revolution is simply, " power in the hands of 
the many, wealth in the hands of the few." 



114 THE NEW MIND 

As a thoughtful writer in the Manchester 
Guardian puts it: 

I think the great mass of people who are learn- 
ing more and more to think and speak of them- 
selves as the " dispossessed," the " disinherited," 
will refuse much longer to be " the muck round 
the roots." And in the violence of their revolt 
not only the fine flower of culture but all chance, 
perhaps for several generations, of decent com- 
fort may be sacrificed. What, then, do we need ? 

His own answer (somewhat like that of Ralph 
Adams Cram) is this: 

Surely a new standard of values. A power to 
find the good things of life in the goods of the 
spirit, and in those forms of wealth which in- 
crease in proportion as they are widely diffused. 
In short, I am back at that problem which so 
often exercised me in pre-war days, namely, the 
problem of evangelical poverty. If we could 
make plain living and high thinking the fashion, 
and extravagant and self-indulgent living bad 
form, how many of our problems would be 
solved ? 

There is much in this answer, for, as we 
have already seen, things in whatever quantity 
are not sufficient to satisfy the life of man. 
But the best defense, as we saw, against 
destructive revolution can be only the most 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 115 

complete justice to all, whatever that may re- 
quire. Without such essential justice, exhorta- 
tion to plain living and high thinking will be 
taken to be only the old device of all the gen- 
erations to use religion to keep the masses of 
men satisfied with injustice. 

If, then, we are to defeat the perils of the 
evil inheritance from the war, of disillusion- 
ment, of reaction, of destructive revolution, 
there are required: enormous constructive ef- 
forts in every sphere ; a new fight for freedom 
and for a more thoroughgoing democracy ; in- 
dividual determination, discriminating educa- 
tion, and the great motives of morals and re- 
ligion — all applied at many points ; wide-spread 
community improvement of living conditions; 
the discernment of new grounds of hope from 
a broader, deeper and more specific survey of 
world-conditions, and from moral and religious 
considerations ; the doing everywhere of essen- 
tial justice in such economic changes as will 
give exacter meaning to the democratic watch- 
word — liberty, fraternity, equality; and a 
growing moral and religious victory over hu- 
man selfishness in all realms. That is the 
great task with which the perils of our age 
confront us. This survey of what is required 
to overcome the perils of the new age makes it 
plain that nowhere are political or economic or 



Il6 THE NEW MIND 

social changes enough, but that everywhere, 
nevertheless, they have most important help to 
give. 

II 

Defeating the Perils of the Nezv Age 
1. Setting aside for the present all the 
educational and moral and religious demands, 
let us, as Americans, get some glimpse at least 
of what might be achieved through political, 
economic or social means for the insuring of a 
better civilization. It is possible to give only 
illustrations. The program of the British La- 
bour Party has peculiar significance for us 
here. For it suggests more clearly, concretely, 
and consistently perhaps than any other how 
much might be done conceivably by political 
means in those enormous constructive efforts 
now called for in every sphere, in the new fight 
for freedom and a more thoroughgoing democ- 
racy, and in such economic changes as any true 
conception of liberty, fraternity and equality 
required. Something like this program we 
shall probably ultimately have to face. 
The Party thus defines its aim : 

If we in Britain are to escape from the decay 
of civilization itself ... we must ensure 
that what is presently to be built up is a new 
social order, based not on fighting but on frater- 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 117 

nity; not on the competitive struggle for the 
means of bare life, but on a deliberately planned 
cooperation in production and distribution for the 
benefit of all who participate by hand or by brain ; 
not on the utmost possible inequality of riches, 
but on a systematic approach toward a healthy 
equality of material circumstances for every per- 
son born into the world; not on an enforced do- 
minion over subject nations, subject races, sub- 
ject colonies, subject classes, or a subject sex, 
but, in industry as well as in government, on that 
equal freedom, that general consciousness of con- 
sent, and that widest possible participation in 
power, both economic and political, which is 
characteristic of democracy. 

Professor A. B. Wolfe puts in this compact 
and philosophical form a corresponding Amer- 
ican view of the case for democracy: 

What then is democracy? Democracy is a 
spirit, an attitude, an insight, a view-point, and 
an ethic. All ethics is at bottom a calculus of 
ends and means. The fundamental meaning of 
democracy must be ethical, not political. Thus 
understood, democracy holds (1) that every in- 
dividual is an end in himself; (2) that no indi- 
vidual is to be regarded primarily as a means to 
the fulfillment of the purposes or desires of any 
other individual; (3) that no class or group of 
individuals is to be regarded primarily as a means 
to the interests of another class as end; (4) that 



Il8 THE NEW MIND 

opportunity, and, so far as opportunity is de- 
pendent upon them, material wealth and income, 
should be distributed to individuals in proportion 
to capacity and willingness to use them for the 
collective good; (5) that the collective good will 
be highest when opportunity, which at best is 
limited in quantity and quality, is distributed so 
that each individual is enabled to develop his 
potential powers and capacities in like proportion 
to the development of these potentialities in every 
other individual; (6) that the means to the utili- 
zation of individual capacity and the develop- 
ment of individual happiness can be found only 
in the willing, fair-minded cooperative work of 
individuals and groups, all of whom accept and 
live up to the foregoing principles; and (7) that 
to secure the operation of these principles all 
forms and devices of autocracy, and of the 
master-and-servant ethics, whether in the family, 
in national political life, in international relations, 
or in industry, must give way to government by 
the people as a whole. 

Is there anything in that aim that ought not to 
be sought in these days of world reconstruc- 
tion? 

2. When we think of these days of unrest 
and the multiplied violations of freedom even 
in America, can we doubt a more elemental 
truth, that our government, state and national, 
is solemnly bound not only to cease its un- 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 1 19 

warrantable interference with freedom, and 
the plans for further interference through 
sedition laws for peace time, but also to give 
the fullest protection to freedom of discussion? 
Surely the Philadelphia Yearly Meeting of the 
Friends is basicly and everlastingly right, when 
they say: 

There is one way — and one way only — in which 
we can hope to achieve sane and peaceful prog- 
ress. It is the way of education, of increasing 
understanding of the causes and cures of this 
great unrest. And there is one condition — and 
one condition only — upon which we can hope to 
follow this path of peaceable and orderly ad- 
vance. It is the condition of individual liberty, 
liberty to interchange ideas and information, lib- 
erty to speak and write, liberty to discuss. In 
any other direction lies stagnation or upheaval. 
. . . No man can measure the harm that may 
ensue if we continue these incroachments upon 
freedom of expression. History is replete with 
lessons of the folly of suppression. ... No 
easy indifference will suffice to maintain freedom 
among us. Liberty asks of us a price, the price 
of tolerance toward those to whom we do not 
wish to show tolerance. But it is only the un- 
pleasant or hated utterance that really tests the 
quality of our liberty. " The supreme test of 
civil liberty," a noted English lord has said, " is 
our determination to protect an unpopular minor- 
ity in time of national excitement" 



120 THE NEW MIND 

Every one of us has some power to help at this 
vital point. 

One is glad to hear the same doctrine un- 
equivocally declared in the Senate by Senator 
France : 

We hold it to be an elemental and self-evident 
truth that there can be no free government with- 
out practical and absolute freedom of speech, an 
uninfluenced and unfettered press, and the un- 
abridged right of the people to assemble to peti- 
tion for a redress of their grievances. We de- 
mand the immediate restoration of these rights, 
the repeal of the unconstitutional and tyrannical 
Espionage act, and a recommendation of amnesty 
for all political prisoners held under this federal 
statute only for political opinions or for words 
spoken or written, as distinguished from direct 
incitement to violence, acts of violence, or overt 
acts against the government. You have con- 
demned Bolshevism for its confiscation of real 
and personal property. But that is a worse form 
of Bolshevism which confiscates real and personal 
rights. Confiscation of real and personal prop- 
erty affects the few. The confiscation of real 
and personal rights impoverishes all. 

Ill 

Preserving and Fulfilling the Values of the 
Nezv Age 
But we are to ask, also, hozv political, 
economic and social changes may serve not 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 121 

only to withstand the perils of the new age, 
but to preserve and fulfill its values. Those 
values we conceived to be the values involved 
in some of the outstanding characteristics of 
the present world-order; in the help of the 
moral demonstrations of the war; and in the 
greatest ideal achievements of the war. 

1. In the first place, there are great grounds 
of hope in some of the outstanding character- 
istics of the present world-order: world sol- 
idarity; prodigiously increased resources of 
power and wealth and knowledge made possible 
through modern science; forced scientific co- 
operation on an unheard-of scale; the world- 
wide trend toward democracy and the universal 
diffusion of knowledge; the establishment of a 
League of Nations to Enforce Peace, even 
granting its limitations; the steadily growing 
internationalism; and the deepening sense of 
the necessity of a larger and more significant 
goal for social progress. 

These characteristics alone make this a great 
age, surely not to be despaired of. And there 
is scarcely one of them — as our previous dis- 
cussion has already suggested — that either 
cannot be used, or will not directly help, to a 
better social order, a finer civilization. 

Let us take one concrete illustration — and a 
test case — the hopes from the League of Na- 



122 THE NEW MIND 

tions, in spite of the great obstacles it has en- 
countered. So much is here at stake that it is 
worth while to quote at length Professor Seig- 
nobos' able discussion of this vexed question 
in the New Bur ope: 

Should so many obstacles make us despair of 
the League of Nations, of general disarmament 
and a permanent peace? Must Europe resign 
herself to reverting to the costly and fragile ex- 
pedients of pre-war days — the armed peace and 
balancing alliances? Or is there still some hope 
of an international future different from the 
past? . . . 

If the work of the Conference has been im- 
perfect, it has not been in vain, and its creations, 
incomplete as they may be, offer a very hopeful 
perspective. The League of Nations is born (the 
Conference has drawn up its birth certificate) : it 
is not still-born, as the adherents of military tra- 
dition would fain have us believe. It is as yet 
only a permanent alliance of former belligerents, 
but it is so constituted as to be capable of enlarge- 
ment into a real League of All the Nations. We 
may sum up as follows the grounds for hoping 
that this transformation may be achieved: — 

(i) The territorial settlement of Europe, which 
is the most reasonable part of the work of the 
Conference, establishes between the various 
States a new balance, more favourable to inter- 
national peace. It reduces the number of the 
Great Powers, which are always more disposed 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 1 2$ 

to disturb the peace, less resigned to the limita- 
tion of their sovereignty by obligations of inter- 
national morality; while the three fallen Powers 
are just the three military monarchies, those 
most hostile to peaceful order. It creates four 
States of medium strength — Poland, Czecho- 
slovakia, Jugo-Slavia and Rumania — strong 
enough to form a barrier against the old aggres- 
sive empires, but not strong enough to pursue an 
aggressive policy themselves. This distribution 
of forces, which had not been known in Europe 
since the sixteenth century, facilitates the entry 
of the various States into the League of Nations, 
whose nucleus is formed by the three great dem- 
ocratic Powers — Britain, France and Italy — each 
eager to avoid war. 

(2) The League is open to the neutrals of 
Europe and America, who are already beginning 
to enter. These are all medium-sized or small 
States, democratic in constitution and pacific in 
policy. They will bring with them the desire to 
make the League universal and will introduce a 
current of international opinion such as will tone 
down national egoisms. 

(3) The League has received from the Con- 
ference several effective functions — notably the 
administration of mixed territories — the State of 
Danzig, the State of the Saar (with Fiume and 
the Straits to follow) : the control over the rights 
of minorities ; the supervision of extra-European 
territory disposed of under a mandate. These 
functions have brought and will bring into being 



124 THE NEW MIND 

organs that will serve as precedents for the crea- 
tion of other international organs. 

(4) The League has received several interna- 
tional powers — the right of inviting States to 
revise the treaties, the right of urging upon them 
the reduction of armaments, the right of holding 
them to the acceptance of arbitration in cases of 
dispute. These are as yet merely moral powers 
without "sanction"; but they can exercise an 
irresistible pressure on the various Governments, 
when once they have the backing of a strong in- 
ternational public opinion. 

(5) The League has created and already set in 
motion a permanent international organ — the 
Secretariat — an office for the registration of all 
international treaties, designed to become a centre 
of information for all facts of international char- 
acter and the instrument of concentration for all 
international services. The Secretariat, provided 
with a permanent international staff, will be a 
centre where international public opinion will 
form, and whence it will permeate to the Gov- 
ernments. 

(6) The League has created an international 
Labour Commission, which has already prepared 
international legislation on conditions of work 
and constituted the International Labour Bureau. 
These organs place those in power in each coun- 
try in personal contact with the leaders of the 
working-class, the class most opposed to war, 
most eager for complete disarmament and lasting 
peace. In proportion as Labour extends its 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 125 

power in the internal politics of the various 
States, it will give added force to the League of 
Nations to assume direction of world policy. 

(7) The Governments, out of fear of limiting 
their sovereignty, would not permit the creation 
of any international powers — neither legislature 
nor judicature, nor even army; they merely 
formed an executive, consisting solely of repre- 
sentatives of the Governments. But those in 
power, instead of being represented according to 
the traditional method by members of the diplo- 
matic bureaucracy, will be present in person at 
the deliberations of the executive. . . . For 
the head of a parliamentary Government is not 
an official, but an elected representative of his 
Parliament and subject to the public opinion of 
his people. The League of Nations, then, is al- 
ready provided with a tolerably representative 
executive. The permanent Court of Justice 
which is at present being organized, only has 
restricted powers ; but it will be sufficient to ex- 
tend it in order to make of it the supreme inter- 
national court. . . . The League will at first 
only be a confederation without any international 
government. But every durable confederation 
ends by transforming itself into a federation. 

The path which leads to the League of Na- 
tions is still encumbered by obstacles piled up by 
the Governments. But it has been clearly marked 
out, and if the nations once set forth upon it, they 
will in time reach the goal of their desires. [The 
New Europe, March 25, 1920, pp. 251-253.] 



126 THE NEW MIND 

Such development of the present League of 
Nations would be politics of a high order, and 
make directly for a better civilization. 

2. Besides the values involved in certain 
outstanding characteristics of the present 
world-order, there were mentioned, it will be 
remembered, the moral demonstrations of the 
zvar, and the greatest ideal achievements of the 
zvar. The moral demonstrations of the war 
were these: — that we should get rid of shallow 
views of progress, of creed, and of morals; 
and that we should be certain of the inescapable 
grip of the laws of God upon the life of na- 
tions as well as of individuals. The greatest 
ideal achievements of the war were considered 
to be: the rare idealism with which America 
came into the war ; men's deepening conviction 
of the supremacy of the intangible values; co- 
operation in a great cause on an unheard-of 
scale ; the largest measure of the spirit of sacri- 
fice the world had ever seen; and the resulting 
new revelation of common men. 

Now both these moral demonstrations of the 
war and these greatest ideal achievements of 
the war, — if they continue at all to be vital 
realities — cannot help affecting in the long run 
political, economic and social conditions. But 
both, as their names indicate, bear so directly 
upon the educational and moral and religious 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 1 27 

challenge of this new age, that here, too, I 
must content myself with a single but inclusive 
illustration, bearing upon political and social 
changes. 

The nezv revelation, in the war, of common 
men should mean a new birth for democracy, — 
a truer, more consistent and more thorough- 
going democracy than the world has ever yet 
seen, in line with something like the British 
Labour Program, or Professor Wolfe's parallel 
statement. The common men have earned this 
right. That would be the only ultimate justi- 
fication of the war. It must be a democracy 
rooted at every point in the spiritual principle 
of reverence for personality, the sense of the 
priceless value and the inviolable sacredness of 
every person. Every relation in the democ- 
racy — personal, industrial, class, national, 
racial — must be tested by that principle. There 
must be no use of persons as things, as mere 
means, as comfortable but despised conveni- 
ences. It must be a democracy as radical as 
the essential and radical democracy of Christ, 
that shall not be able to doubt that property and 
institutions are made for men, not men for 
property and institutions. It must be a democ- 
racy eager to measure up to the included prin- 
ciples of obligation according to power, and of 
" first in service/' 



128 THE NEW MIND 

For such a democracy we must all get ready 
here in America. Ultimately it will come, with 
or without our consent. But it ought to come 
by the clear and glad choice of the whole peo- 
ple. But the discouraging thing in the political 
field to-day is that there is no evidence that 
either of our old parties is grappling earnestly 
with these problems of a radical democracy, 
or is anything but selfishly reactionary. One 
of the ablest of our American editors has said 
that the most conservative parties in the world 
are our two chief American parties. And it 
is no credit to America that that is true. A 
Republican Senator brings a like charge: 

Judged by their legislative records in Congress 
during the last three years, both of these two 
great parties are as decadent as the issues which 
first quickened them into being. 

One of two things is likely to be true: either we 
shall have an essentially new party, dealing 
earnestly and honestly with the issues of a 
radical democracy by political means, or we 
shall have such a democracy forced upon us 
along industrial lines. 

In any case, that new birth for democracy 
will require the patient working through of the 
baffling problems of a truly democratic policy, 
in the interests of the whole people, as to the 
discovery and use of natural forces; as to the 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 1 29 

control and utilization of natural resources; as 
to the management and ownership of public 
utilities: as to cooperation and democracy in 
industries ; and as to those manifold social mal- 
adjustments that still blot our record as a na- 
tion. 

One does not wish to leave this economic 
issue vague. There is a direct challenge to 
Christian laymen in it, as Professor Small has 
said: 

Since the armistice, the main problem of the 
Western nations has shifted. The central human 
question now, and probably for generations to 
come, is, What is right, and how may we realize 
the right in economic relations? Even in the 
countries which are least pacified and between the 
countries that are trying to organize stable peace, 
this demand for economic justice is the pivot of 
all the rest. Since this fundamental question of 
economic justice has taken possession of the big 
world, the direction of religious dynamics must 
and should change accordingly. . . . Both in 
general and in the concrete the Christian demand 
is for a Christianity able to vitalize economic 
righteousness. ... As I have said, of late 
there has been no lack of Christian declaration 
that Christianity, whether churched or un- 
churched, must make the cause of economic jus- 
tice its own. Yet evidence is still lacking that the 
leading laymen in the American churches are 
willing to throw their influence in favour of recog- 



I30 THE NEW MIND 

nizing the problem of economic justice as the 
chief spiritual issue of our period. It remains 
to be seen whether the balance of power will 
apply the full force of organized Christianity 
to investigation and settlement of that problem. 
[The Christian Century, April 29, 1920.] 

In the working out of all these difficult prob- 
lems here in America, there is both need and 
opportunity to make nczv and fruitful applica- 
tions of our guiding principle of reverence for 
personality. For it suggests a vital test in the 
choice of methods in the various forms of co- 
operation and state action: namely, the careful 
preservation of individual initiative. For 
nothing is more important, both for the indi- 
vidual himself and for society, than that the 
individual should be encouraged to the fullest 
exercise of his own initiative, and so to the 
largest contribution to the community life. 
By being most true to his own individuality he 
will be most true to all. It is, thus, of prime 
importance for the progress of the race in this 
after-the-war age that a sharp discrimination 
should be made between those forms of co- 
operation and state-action that tend to check 
and repress individual initiative, and those 
other forms of cooperation and state-action 
that definitely encourage such initiative and 
seek the best and largest contribution from 



POLITICAL AND SOCIAL CHALLENGE 131 

each citizen and class and state and nation. 
Socialism seems often to fail here to exercise 
a much needed discrimination. It is one thing 
to resist innovations, adopted for the period of 
the war, which threaten personal liberty after 
the war. It is quite another, in a merely 
standpat attitude, to resist innovations which 
consist in a remodeling of our national and in- 
ternational organization, " so that it operates 
more efficiently and more humanely." One of 
the great issues of the time, therefore, is the 
decision that the enormous powers of forced 
cooperation and organization characteristic of 
our time are to be guided by a deep sense of 
the need of individual free initiative, and to be 
used for the constructive enterprises of the 
kingdom of God, for the true progress of the 
race. 

This is in full harmony with the fundamental 
thought of Bertrand Russell's Principles of 
Social Reconstruction in judging what is the 
right direction of movement in any given time: 

There are two general principles which are al- 
ways applicable. 

1. The growth and vitality of individuals and 
communities is to be promoted as far as possible. 

2. The growth of one individual or one com- 
munity is to be as little as possible at the expense 
of another. 



132 THE NEW MIND 

A great moral and religious conception un- 
derlies these principles, as he elsewhere says : 

The first and greatest change that is required 
is to establish a morality of initiative, not a mo- 
rality of submission, a morality of hope rather 
than fear, of things to be done rather than of 
things to be left undone. ... It will be in- 
spired by a vision of what human life may be, 
and will be happy with the joy of creation, living 
in a large free world of initiative and hope. It 
will love mankind, not for what they are to the 
outward eye, but for what imagination shows 
that they have it in them to become. 

This is in the very spirit of Christ's faith in 
men and reverence for them. There is need 
here for earnest study, and loyal cooperation 
and determination on the part of Christian men 
and women. 

And beyond all the borders of America itself 
an enlarged and deepened democratic ideal will 
require world-vision, world-thinking, world- 
responsibility. That America should refuse 
finally to take her full share of responsibility, 
in mandatories or otherwise, in the cooperative 
endeavour of a vigorous growing League of 
Free Nations would be not only irremediably 
to sully the rare idealism of her war record, but 
also eternally to shame her people. The time 
of her isolation is gone. Those are blind who 
deny it. It is impossible that we should stay 
in our present state of shame and humiliation. 



LECTURE V 

THE NEW MIND : THE EDU- 
CATIONAL CHALLENGE 



LECTURE V 

THE NEW MIND: THE EDUCATIONAL 
CHALLENGE 

IN our attempt to define the new mind 
needed for the new age, we turn now 
from the field of the political, economic 
and social changes required to the demands 
made upon education. What can education 
do to overcome the perils of the new age? 
What can education do to insure that the great 
values of this critical time shall be carried fully 
over into that new civilization which we seek? 
At every stage in the facing of the perils of 
our time — evil inheritances from the war, dis- 
illusionment, reaction, revolution— better edu- 
cation is manifestly required. How else shall 
we share in that new fight for freedom and for 
a more thoroughgoing democracy, in those 
enormous constructive efforts demanded, in 
the impending economic changes? At every 
stage in the needed incarnation of the great 
values of our time, too, there is the same neces- 
sity for an education that shall match the great 
i35 



136 THE NEW MIND 

tasks and opportunities revealed. The need 
and opportunity, then, are prodigious. Can 
the educational forces measure up to that need 
and to that opportunity ? 

In these last two chapters, dealing with the 
educational and with the moral and religious 
challenge of our times, while all that will be 
said will be presented in the full light of our 
consideration of the perils and values of the 
new age, there will probably be a certain gain 
in simplicity, directness and interest, in not at- 
tempting detailed comparisons between the 
different parts of our discussion. 

What, then, are some of the demonstrations 
of the war and of after-the-war conditions that 
particularly concern educators? And what 
are some of the consequent demands made 
upon education to-day ? 

I 

The Power of Education 
First of all, the world has probably never 
seen such a demonstration of the power of 
education, as in Germany's preparation for her 
war for world domination. Here was a people 
virtually made over in fifty years, its standards 
and ideals reversed. The immoral philosophy 
of the State as above all moral obligations and 
the materialistic interpretation of the survival 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 137 

of the fittest had been drilled into the whole 
nation from kindergarten to university, until 
it permeated all their life, and they responded 
as a unit with the same formula, the same 
gesture, the same emotion. This proof of the 
stupendous power of education was most im- 
pressive, and is a distinct challenge to Amer- 
ican educators to note what tremendous changes 
can be wrought by education even within 
limited periods. 

At the same time it is solemn warning; not 
only because it shows how completely educa- 
tion may be prostituted to evil ends, but also 
because it reveals so clearly a false conception 
of the aim of education. The uniformity of 
result itself betrays the presence and working 
of a kind of monstrous machine. Education 
cannot be safely made into mere propaganda, 
whether for good or evil ends. To regard the 
pupil simply as means to some ulterior end 
is itself desecration. His own liberty, his own 
initiative, his own personality, his own truth to 
his unique individuality are to be sacredly re- 
spected. A uniform result, therefore, in edu- 
cation is itself an evil. As Russell puts it: 

If the children themselves were considered, ed- 
ucation would not aim at making them belong to 
this party or that, but at enabling them to choose 
intelligently between the parties; it would aim 



I38 THE NEW MIND 

at making them able to think, not at making them 
think what their teachers think. Education as a 
political weapon could not exist if we respected 
the rights of children. 

Germany therefore has two lessons upon 
education to teach the nations: the power of 
education and the constant danger of the prosti- 
tution of education by using it as propaganda. 

II 

The Value of Education 
The crisis of the war and its consequences 
throw also into relief the indispensable value 
of education, not simply for the advantage of 
the individual in competitive struggle, but for 
the whole good of the race. 

In the first place, the war brought out the 
selfish advantage of education for the indi- 
vidual himself. College education proved up 
as an aid to promotion. The extensive educa- 
tional plans of the Government in the demobili- 
zation period brought home to many thousands 
of men the need and gain of further study. 
And there is no doubt that higher education 
gained distinctly in prestige during the war. 
College attendance is increasing, and the care- 
ful statistics of President Hughes make it seem 
most likely that it will increase even beyond the 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 139 

capacity of established institutions to meet it. 
A larger opportunity than the colleges have 
ever had is now before them. They need to 
make ready for it by careful forecast and 
planning. It is the business of American edu- 
cation to make the most of this generally deep- 
ened conviction of the value of education. 

But even this more selfish side of the value 
of education— which too often engrosses our 
attention — is not simply selfish. Education 
proves to be for the advantage of the indi- 
vidual commonly because in some way it en- 
ables him to render a larger service to the 
community. 

But — quite beyond that — there are many 
things in these after-the-war days that give a 
great new emphasis to the indispensable value 
of education for the whole good of the race. 

First of all, in these days of unexampled co- 
operation, we cannot forget that human co- 
operation, even in its simplest forms, requires 
some degree of education, and the education 
must increase as the cooperative task grows in 
size and complexity. 

It is not by accident either that the world- 
wide trend toward democracy is so uniformly 
accompanied with the diffusion of education. 
For democracy as self-government requires for 
its very existence some education. Even the 



140 THE NEW MIND 

simpler problems of democracy require judg- 
ment as to ends to be set, and as to means 
adapted to those ends. And once again, as the 
democracy develops, education must develop 
with it. 

We have seen also, in our analysis of this 
new age in which we are, how inevitably and 
at multiplied points great constructive world 
tasks confront us, appalling in their extent and 
complexity. Good intentions will not solve 
them. They require the farthest reach of 
scientific mastery, and the disciplined educa- 
tion that makes that possible. 

On the other hand, knowledge alone will not 
solve any of our greatest problems. When, for 
example, we think of those larger and more 
significant goals of social activity, which men 
are more and more cherishing as alone ade- 
quate, the indispensable value of education for 
the production of thoughtful, unselfish, signifi- 
cant personalities is plain. 

Take, for example, that pregnant paragraph 
of Professor Ward's on the trend of progress, 
based on a wide comparative study of social 
programs, already quoted in part, and feel 
again the imperative demands of such goals for 
the completest education on the ideal side : 

It is increasingly apparent that the new order 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 141 

both in plan and in experiment is forming around 
certain definite principles. Men everywhere are 
seeking for a larger measure of equality and for 
the realization of fraternity in universal service 
to each other. They are more and more deter- 
mined to make the social machinery an efficient 
means to the highest ends of human living. It 
is becoming manifest that the development of per- 
sonality is to supersede the acquisition of goods 
as the goal of social activity and that the fullest 
development of personality is to be found in the 
effort to realize the solidarity of the human 
family. 

Surely this critical time can leave us in no 
doubt as to the indispensable value of educa- 
tion, and the vastly increased significance of its 
tasks to-day. 

Ill 

The Comparative Failure of Our Education 
on the Ideal Side 
The war was a time of testing for our whole 
civilization. It tested the adequacy of our edu- 
cation. Scientific technical education seems to 
have borne the test very well. College educa- 
tion, as a training for efficient adaptation to 
varied situations, seems also, as we have seen, 
to have fairly proved out. The number of 
soldiers, on the other hand, who could not read 



142 THE NEW MIND ' 

or write English and had but the most meager 
training made it clear that education had not 
yet conquered the problem of illiteracy. But 
I fear that the most serious defect in our edu- 
cation, which the war brought out, was the 
comparative failure of our education on the 
ideal side. The very able British Committee 
on the Army and Religion, in their careful 
study of religious conditions in the British 
Army, assert that nothing was more clear in 
all their findings than the appalling ignorance 
on the part of the masses of the British sol- 
diers of the essentials of religion and of Chris- 
tianity. Vague superstitions and negations 
made up far too large a part of their religious 
ideas. There is evidence which makes one 
think that much the same thing would have to 
be said concerning great numbers of our Amer- 
ican soldiers. [Cf. Religion Among American 
Men, The Committee on the War and the Re- 
ligious Outlook, pp. 14 ff.] Indeed one is 
often struck with the profound ignorance of 
essential Christianity on the part of many 
highly trained men even at home. The ease 
with which many members of flourishing 
Christian churches, too, are swept into shallow 
religious fads and into what at best are ex- 
travagant one-sided emphases is evidence of a 
similar lack of any thorough religious ground- 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 143 

ing. Fortunately the Christian spirit is often 
more pervasive than Christian ideas. 

But this dire failure in religious education — 
for that I fear it must be called — suggests a 
similar comparative failure on the entire ideal 
side of our education. For the interests of re- 
ligion were more specifically brought out 
through the churches, than the finer aspects of 
education were, either directly through the 
schools, or through other agencies. Both the 
experience with soldiers in classes in the mean- 
ing of the war and the outcomes that ought to 
follow, and the wide-spread reaction from the 
war since — in an epidemic of restlessness, lack 
of initiative, lack of sense of responsibility, and 
selfish pleasure-seeking — indicate pretty clearly 
that for great multitudes the more ideal in- 
terests in education had not been deeply 
grounded or largely taken on. Clear insight, 
for example, into the aims of the war, into the 
meaning of democracy, into the great ethical 
principles of the social consciousness, — to say 
nothing of aesthetic appreciation — was too gen- 
erally lacking. 

Now this comparative failure — under the 
great test of war — of our education on its ideal 
side is of vital concern ; for it touches the whole 
deeper life of the people, and their fitness for a 
great forward step. It not only calls for great 



144 THE NEW MIND 

new emphases in education but challenges our 
whole educational process, and compels us to 
ask whether something is not fundamentally at 
fault in our present educational aims, spirit 
and method. And these all we need to ex- 
amine in the light of the present world-situa- 
tion, though all three are closely interrelated. 

IV 

The End of Education 

In the first place, what should be the end of 
education? What light have these critical 
times to throw upon it? There is need of 
some careful, discriminating thinking here, for 
we are all too prone to regard education as 
some kind of propaganda, as an opportunity 
to train the race into our ideas and ideals. 

To begin with, it is too late to forget that 
education must have both an individual and a 
social goal, in harmony with one another, and 
with the laws of human development, personal 
and social. 

1. We may appeal confidently to the guid- 
ing principle in our whole discussion — the 
supreme ethical and religious principle of rever- 
ence for personality, the deep-going sense of 
the priceless value and inviolable sacredness 
of every person — to give us our ruling educa- 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE I45 

tional ideal, and to help us to solve the really 
difficult paradox of a true education. For the 
principle of reverence for personality involves 
inevitably both respect for one's own person- 
ality, and respect for the liberty and personality 
of others. It is at the base, therefore, as self- 
respect, of a true individualism, and, as respect 
for others, of a true socialism. It combines 
thus both " mental and spiritual fellowship 
among men," and " mental and spiritual inde- 
pendence on the part of the individual " — to 
use Herrmann's most suggestive paradoxical 
summary of the moral law. 

Our principle suggests, thus, both the indi- 
vidual and the social goal in education ; for the 
individual goal, the full development of a free, 
independent but reverent personality; and for 
the social goal, a developed society of such 
personalities. And each goal is necessary 
to the other, and cannot be dissociated from 
it. 

2. On the individual side, education looks 
to the full development of a certain kind of 
person whom we have described as free and in- 
dependent but reverent. He might be char- 
acterized perhaps by the single word reverent, 
or by the single word thoughtful, taking that 
word in its full sweep. For the thoughtful 
man is a thinking man, discerning the laws of 



146 THE NEW MIND 

life, seeing things in proportion, a considerate 
man, and a man of inner integrity, intellectual 
and spiritual. 

This whole principle of reverence is so 
fundamentally spiritual that there is gain in 
bringing forward at this point the precise moral 
and religious characteristics of that nezv mind 
for which the crisis of this new age calls. 
Jesus defined that new mind with singular 
fidelity in the Beatitudes. The men, He said, 
who were to be salt and light for the new age, 
were those characterized by these qualities: the 
humility of the open mind, penitence, self-con- 
trol at its highest, the earnest pursuit of char- 
acter, sympathy with men, reverence toward 
men, promoting peace among men, sacrificing 
for men. These qualities are none of them 
dominating or enslaving. They are all rever- 
ent. They are all indispensable to a fine 
society. They are the basic personal and social 
qualities upon which every new age must build. 
They constitute a true ideal for moral and re- 
ligious education to attain. 

3. On the social side, education looks to 
that society of developed free, independent, 
reverent personalities which is the goal of all 
human progress. Here a true education may 
be said to be furnishing the conditions for 
fruitful and thoroughgoing cooperation. It 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 147 

may be said, also, to be answering the un- 
conscious questions of growing youth to the 
race: What are you trying to do? How far 
have you got? Where can I help? In other 
words, education may be here conceived as 
bringing the individual, as I have elsewhere 
said, to a personal sharing in the great intel- 
lectual and spiritual achievements of the race: 
the scientific spirit and method, the historical 
spirit, the philosophic mind, aesthetic apprecia- 
tion, the social consciousness with its great 
ethical implications, and religious discernment 
and commitment. 

Here again, as in the Beatitudes, to which 
these racial spiritual achievements are strangely 
akin, the emphasis is all on the qualitative 
spirit, upon a kind of person, not upon the 
dogmatic content of certain views. These 
qualities do not call anywhere for the dominat- 
ing, enslaving attitude in education. On the 
contrary, they will be best taught where they 
are best embodied, where the reverent spirit is 
most manifest. 

4. But, it will be said: Are we not bound to 
teach the truth to our pupils? Undoubtedly. 
There are great essential and inspiring truths 
about the world and men and God involved in 
this whole theory and process of education. 
Our guiding principle itself implies a great 



148 THE NEW MIND 

truth concerning human nature. And we 
should try to help our pupils to the truth in all 
realms. But this does not justify the dominat- 
ing, over-riding, dogmatic attitude in teaching. 
The parallel between the pursuit of truth and 
the pursuit of duty is at this point very close. 
The true father must say, as Patterson DuBois 
puts it : not, " I will conquer that child what- 
ever it may cost him " ; but, " I will help that 
child to conquer himself, whatever it may cost 
me/' So in trying to bring another into the 
truth, one must remember — what Christ so 
constantly had in mind — that neither truth nor 
goodness can be laid on another from without. 
Truth must be earned. The dogmatic method, 
therefore, from the start, is in danger of sub- 
stituting a false process for a true one, even 
when one is most certain concerning the full 
truth of his own view. That, I fear, is what 
we have too often done in education. 

But more than this is to be remembered in 
this pursuit of the truth. Both the scientific 
spirit and the first Beatitude make the humble 
open mind the first condition of coming into 
the truth. Now that humble open mind must 
be retained by the teacher as well as by the 
pupil, for truth's own sake. The teacher 
comes to the child with humility and faith, try- 
ing reverently to make possible that new ray 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 149 

of light on the truth which absolute fidelity to 
the individuality of this soul may bring. Even 
for the sake of those truths and views about 
which the dogmatist is most concerned, there- 
fore, if he looks for growth at all, he must keep 
the completely reverent spirit. 

In this question of the pursuit of truth, there 
is still another aspect to be borne in mind. 
Truth, it was long ago said, needs only an open 
field. Truth comes to be, that is, not by men 
keeping silent about it, but by every man bear- 
ing honest testimony to that measure of truth 
it has been given him to see, though with clear 
and tolerant consciousness that others have 
much to teach him. There is in this attitude 
a true combination of self-respect and respect 
for others. On the other hand, it is also true 
that in the relation of teacher and pupil, as in 
the relation of parent and child, there must be 
great care that the older and maturer person- 
ality should not over-ride the younger and less 
mature personality. Still, if that condition is 
fulfilled, the teacher may not only rightfully 
enough at the right time — which will be after 
the pupil has had his own unhurried oppor- 
tunity to reach a conclusion of his own — bear 
his testimony to the truth in the matter under 
discussion; but also may be said to owe that 
testimony to the pupil, as one element in the 



150 THE NEW MIND 

complete data on which the pupil must finally 
act. 

A chief reason, we may be sure, for the com- 
parative failure of our education on the ideal 
side, is to be found in our failure to see the 
true end in education; in our failure in the 
reverent spirit, and so in our willingness to 
substitute a short, false dogmatic method for a 
true and reverent one. There is no cheap and 
easy and lazy way to achieve education on the 
ideal side. It has spiritual conditions. It is 
comparatively easy to get from a pupil external 
and conventional conformity. To get a gen- 
uine inner life of his own is another matter. 

V 

The Spirit of 'Education 
So closely interwoven are the end, the spirit, 
and the method of education, that, in the dis- 
cussion of the ends of education, I have neces- 
sarily anticipated much that also indicates the 
spirit and the method of education. 

As to the spirit of education, it has been al- 
ready clearly implied that the whole conception 
and process of education must be permeated 
through and through with the spirit of rever- 
ence for personality, — one's own, and that of 
others. And respect for others includes dis- 
tinct respect both for the liberty of others and 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 151 

for the sanctity of their personality. The true 
teacher, therefore, will abhor the spirit of the 
boss at any point, will leave large scope for 
free action, and will know that the one holy ex- 
istence in the world is a person. And with the 
Christ, he will stand outside the door of the 
heart, to knock. He will not force the door. 
It is refreshing to find so beautiful an expres- 
sion of this indispensable spirit of reverence, 
which is so seldom rightly valued, as Bertrand 
Russell gives: 

The man who has reverence will not think it 
his duty to " mould " the young. He feels in all 
that lives, but especially in human beings, and 
most of all in children, something sacred, indefi- 
nable; unlimited, something individual and 
strangely precious, the growing principle of life, 
an embodied fragment of the dumb striving of 
the world. In the presence of a child he feels 
an unaccountable humility — a humility not easily 
defensible on any rational ground, and yet some- 
how nearer to wisdom than the easy self-con- 
fidence of many parents and teachers. The out- 
ward helplessness of the child and the appeal of 
dependence make him conscious of the responsi- 
bility of a trust. His imagination shows him 
what the child may become, for good or evil, how 
its impulses may be developed or thwarted, how 
its hopes must be dimmed and the life in it grow 
less living, how its trust will be bruised and its 



152 THE NEW MIND 

quick desires replaced by brooding will. All this 
gives him a longing to help the child in its own 
battle ; he would equip and strengthen it, not for 
some outside end proposed by the State or by any 
other impersonal authority, but for the ends 
which the child's own spirit is obscurely seeking. 
The man who feels this can wield the authority 
of an educator without infringing the principle 
of liberty. 

And a spirit like that is peculiarly needed 
just now in all our education. The seeming 
fractiousness of the younger generation may 
unconsciously reflect this need. For as our 
claim on life becomes more and more not sim- 
ply a demand for possessions but for creative 
worth-while activities and reverent and re- 
warding personal relations ; and as our concep- 
tion of the goal of human progress, thus, has 
taken on largeness and significance, and has 
tended in these critical years to shape itself, as 
we have seen, in terms of a developed society 
of reverent personalities; — so the education 
which is to understand and guide these new 
aspirations of the race must be instinct with 

the supreme principle of reverence for the 
person. 

VI 

The Method of Education 
1. What shall be the method of the educa- 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 1 53 

tion which is to guide these large new aims of 
men? Perhaps it cannot be stated more suc- 
cinctly or more accurately than in that para- 
doxical summary of Herrmann's of the moral 
law — " mental and spiritual fellowship among 
men ; mental and spiritual independence on the 
part of the individual." This is precisely the 
way in which all that is best in human life goes 
forward. It is the one great method of all 
growing values. 

It is indeed Christ's own fundamental 
method: the contagion of the good life, on the 
one hand ; the insistence on the essential sound- 
ness of the individual life, on the other. For, 
on the one hand, the men of the new mind de- 
fined in the Beatitudes were to be the salt that 
keeps the earth's life sound; the light that en- 
lightens the world's darkness; the leaven to 
leaven the whole lump of humanity; the seed 
of the new living kingdom of men. This is the* 
method of the contagion of the good life, of 
mental and spiritual fellowship among men. 
On the other hand, the salt must not have lost 
its saltness ; the light must not have gone out ; 
the leaven must not be spoiled; the seed must 
not be a dead seed. This is the insistence on 
the steady soundness of the individual life 
used, on " mental and spiritual independence on 
the part of the individual" 



154 THE NEW MIND 

It is in exact conformity to this principle 
that Christ is nowhere satisfied that men should 
take truth or life on externally, from without, 
or simply on authority, — even His own. He 
knows that, in very deed, truth and life cannot 
so come to any one. He insists, therefore, 
that men shall see for themselves and decide 
for themselves, — shall come into insights, de- 
cisions, convictions, ideals, hopes, that are 
truly their own ; — that they shall have person- 
ally shared in His thought and life. 

This, too, is the method by which scientific 
discoveries alone get their full fruition. The 
original discoverer, for example, of the Roent- 
gen ray, shares his discovery with all other 
workers in his field — the method of fellow- 
ship. But if that fellowship is to produce any 
results, there must be not merely routine repe- 
tition of the discoverer's work, but honest in- 
dependent investigation, alert for new phe- 
nomena and relations — the method of inde- 
pendence. Only so will there be real verifica- 
tion, and real extension of the original dis- 
covery. 

It is in the same fashion that there comes 
that personal sharing in those great intellectual 
and spiritual achievements of the race — the 
scientific spirit and method, the historical spirit, 
v he philosophic mind, aesthetic appreciation, the 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 155 

social consciousness with its great ethical im- 
plications ; and religious discernment and com- 
mitment — in which we saw education might be 
said to consist. 

In fact, this is the one method of any worth- 
while society among men. The individual 
needs fellowship with others at every point, to 
supplement the meagerness of his own view- 
point, his own limited experience. On the 
other hand, that fellowship will have nothing 
to give if there is not mental and spiritual in- 
dependence on the part of the individuals com- 
posing the fellowship. It is hardly open to 
doubt, I suspect, that in American education 
we have not sufficiently stressed the independ- 
ence side. 

In every department and field of education, 
in its every aspect, this, then, is the essential 
method — mental and spiritual fellowship and 
mental and spiritual independence. It will help 
keep sound and vital everything we attempt in 
education. The effectiveness of the method 
lies in this, that it admits no sham or pretense 
at any point. It seeks absolute reality. 

2. What more needs to be said concerning 
the method of education grows right out of the 
laws of human nature. The pupil's develop- 
ment must be in line with the fundamental lazvs 
of his ozun being, and his education, thus, be in 



156 THE NEW MIND 

truth a vital process, simply a kind of hasten- 
ing of what comes from normal living itself. 
For education ought to be just that — hastened 
living. 

What is most essential here is suggested by 
what I have elsewhere called the four great 
practical inferences from modern psychology: 
the complexity of life; the unity of man's 
nature; the central importance of will and 
action ; and the concreteness of the real, leading 
to emphasis on the personal. From the first 
inference comes the necessity of a store of per- 
manent and valuable interests — one of the 
great ends of education — and of realizing that 
life is completely interrelated in all its parts and 
cannot be sharply divided off nor summed up 
in short and simple formulas; but rather has 
its constant paradoxes which we cannot safely 
ignore. It is this complexity which Lecky has 
in mind in his Map of Life, and which he 
calls " the importance of compromise in prac- 
tical life." It is this upon which James is in- 
sisting also when he calls for " the reinstate- 
ment of the vague and inarticulate to its proper 
place in our mental life." The second great 
inference contends that we must keep con- 
stantly in mind the unity of man's nature, and 
recognizes that we cannot tear ourselves clown 
at one point and leave the rest of our life un- 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 1 57 

affected. It demands that all sides of man's 
nature are to be taken into account. It sug- 
gests, too, the importance of remembering the 
mutual influence of body and mind. The third 
great inference, the central importance of will 
and action, indicates that work — adequate ex- 
pressive activity — is one of the greatest means 
to character, influence and happiness alike; as 
the mood of work — the objective, self-forget- 
ful mood — is a prime condition of the finest 
living. The fourth inference gives a like em- 
phasis to personal association as the greatest 
of all means for largeness of life, and to re- 
spect for personality, including self-respect and 
respect for others, as the supreme condition. 

The proper fulfillment of the function of edu- 
cation, then, requires as its great means, first, a 
life sufficiently complex to give acquaintance 
with the great fundamental facts of the world, 
and to call out the entire man ; second, the com- 
pletest possible expressive activity on the part 
of the student; and third, personal association 
with broad and wise and noble lives. And the 
corresponding spirit demanded in education 
must be, first, broad and catholic in both senses 
— as responding to a wide range of interests, 
and looking to the all-round development of the 
individual; second, objective rather than self- 
centered and introspective; and third, imbued 



158 THE NEW MIND 

with the fundamental convictions of the social 
consciousness. These are always the greatest 
and the alone indispensable means and condi- 
tions in a complete education, and they contain 
in themselves the great sources of character, 
of happiness, and of social efficiency. The 
supreme opportunity, in other words, that edu- 
cation should offer is opportunity to use one's 
full powers in a wisely chosen complex envi- 
ronment, in association with the best — and all 
this in an atmosphere, catholic in its interests, 
objective in spirit and method, and demo- 
cratic, unselfish and finely reverent in its per- 
sonal relations. 

Education is inevitably impoverished if it 
fails to take account of the rich complexity of 
life, of the intertwined unity of man's nature, 
of the demand of the whole nature of man for 
expressive activity, of the fact that he is made, 
in every fiber of his being, body and soul, for 
personal relations. Now it is impossible to 
believe, in view of such a revelation of the 
nature of men, that the narrow economic 
theory of human progress and human happi- 
ness that makes man's one great desire posses- 
sion of things is justified. No wonder that 
Russell's Principles of Social Reconstruction 
is largely a rebellion against this " possessive " 
theory of human life. No wonder that he 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 159 

says: "To me, the chief thing to be learnt 
through the war has been a certain view of the 
springs of human action, what they are, and 
what we may legitimately hope that they will 
become." 

VII 

Other Needed Emphases in Education 
Assuming, now, what has been said as to the 
power, value, end, spirit, and method of edu- 
cation, what other emphases are needed in edu- 
cation to-day ? They can be only suggested. 

1. A crucial time of testing like the Great 
War suggests at once that we must at least 
make certain that there is no sham, no pretense, 
no mere going through the motions in any part 
of our education, but absolute reality. At the 
very best, our task is overwhelming. There 
must be no toy tools. 

2. In the second place, if they are not to 
play with their task, educational institutions 
must have greatly increased resources, espe- 
cially for salaries for teachers. The present 
high cost of living only accentuates here a 
constant need. For of the teacher it must be 
said, not only that the labourer is worthy of his 
hire, but also that he is worthy to choose for 
himself his own lines of self-sacrifice, and not 
have them forced upon him. In a democracy, 



l6o THE NEW MIND 

especially, it is also desirable that besides strong 
state educational institutions there should be 
strong independent institutions as well, to in- 
sure variety and wholesome rivalry, and also 
to emphasize the ideal aspects of education in a 
way hardly possible to the state. But com- 
parison with the great wealth of state-sup- 
ported institutions becomes daily more and 
more difficult. If the values of the inde- 
pendent institutions are as important as men 
have professed to believe, there is no cheap 
and easy way out. Great resources must be 
made available. This is a part of the signifi- 
cance of the educational aspect of the Inter- 
Church World Movement, and of other great 
educational campaigns. 

In the meantime, in the interests of honest 
service, where an institution finds its work 
growing beyond its resources, limitation in the 
number of students may well be suggested. 

3. To be sure that our education is fitting 
closely into the needy life of our time, it is 
particularly important now that education 
should furnish in a kind of ideal form the con- 
ditions of a full normal life, in line with the 
psychological laws already considered. 

This would call for various particulars, in 
addition to the larger considerations already 
covered : — the physical and psychological study 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE l6l 

of each pupil, to save from needless handicaps 
and to give a guidance scientifically based; an 
intelligent comprehensive physical educational 
program, with emphasis on out-of-door sports 
and mass athletics, free from professionalism 
and commercialism; and, fitting into this, a 
constructive recreation program as a legitimate 
and needed part of the educational process. 
War statistics at this point are impressive. 

The vital and practical relations of all sub- 
jects taught ought also to be brought out, even 
in liberal education; not primarily at all for 
vocational ends, though they are important, but 
to see the subject in its setting in the real 
world; to insure a better grasp of it. And to 
induce that intensive mastery that is more 
likely to obtain where the vocational ends are 
in mind. In reference to all practical sub- 
jects, it deserves emphasis, too, that it is not 
the subject of a course which determines 
whether it may be legitimately included in 
liberal training, but the way in which it is 
taught. Even the most practical subject can 
be handled in such broad, scientific and 
thoroughgoing fashion as to make it indubi- 
tably cultural in its effect. In any case, the 
closer relation to concrete life is likely to help 
keep our education real at every point. There 
is often an artificialness about academic life 



162 THE NEW MIND 

that is a direct hindrance, rather than help, to a 
genuine education. The student's common de- 
sire to separate responsibility from freedom is 
an illustration ; as is also his frequent conspicu- 
ous waste of opportunity. It is cause for con- 
gratulation that the pressure of numbers upon 
our higher institutions of learning is likely to 
help to crowd out the idler from the privileges 
he abuses. 

As to industrial education, there is real force 
in this labour declaration: 

It is also important that the industrial educa- 
tion which is being fostered and developed should 
have for its purpose not so much training for 
efficiency in industry as training for life in an 
industrial society. A full understanding must be 
had of those principles and activities that are the 
foundation of all productive efforts. Children 
should not only become familiar with tools and 
materials, but they should also receive a thorough 
knowledge of the principles of human control, of 
force and matter underlying our industrial rela- 
tions and sciences. The danger that certain 
commercial and industrial interests may domi- 
nate the character of education must be averted 
by insisting that the workers shall have equal 
representation on all boards of education or com- 
mittees having control over vocational studies 
and training. 

4. The severe lessons of the great war 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 163 

press upon education, too, in unexampled 
fashion the necessity of a training against the 
materialistic possessive valuations of life, with 
their inevitable tragedy for both individual and 
nation; as well as for a training against the 
deification of force and the intoxication of 
power, and the consequent desire to play the 
tyrant. The very spirit of genuine education 
will almost unconsciously guard against these 
perils. 

5. Positively, the present world crisis lays 
upon education the task of training, as never 
before, for a reverent and more thoroughgoing 
democracy. The very principle of reverence 
for personality, made supreme in education, 
should itself insure such training, for it makes 
the school itself in the whole spirit of it a 
rational ethical democracy in which it can 
never be forgotten that self-government neces- 
sarily involves self-discipline. 

6. It is not too much to say that every one 
of the larger aspects of the war — as we have 
earlier reviewed them — makes clear the neces- 
sity of the international mind for every nation 
and for every citizen of the nation that means 
to count intelligently and with full value in 
the life of the world. One of the great les- 
sons of the war, for example, was the exten- 
sion of the moral law from individuals to 



1 64 THE NEW MIND 

nations. That means that selfish isolation, the 
refusal to take other nations into our thoughts 
and plans and cooperative endeavour, is as 
damnable and damning in a nation as in an in- 
dividual. The education to-day that does not 
teach men world-vision, world- feeling, and how 
to think in world-terms, is recreant to the trust 
given it in this age. 

7. Once more, the comparative failure of 
our education on the ideal side makes unmis- 
takable the dire need of definite, discriminating 
but tolerant moral and religious education. 
We must learn, as never before, how to bring 
men to insights, convictions, ideals, decisions 
and hopes, which are no imitations or echoes of 
others, but their very own. I need not say 
more at this point. Two other needed educa- 
tional emphases are so distinctly moral and 
religious that, with this, they belong rather to 
the discussion of the moral and religious chal- 
lenge of the new age, but need to be mentioned 
here, as most important educational tasks for 
this generation. 

8. That our civilization was so near to 
collapse in this world-war meant, we need to 
remember, that the spiritual roots of our 
civilization were shallowly grounded, its Chris- 
tianizing too superficial. We cannot run away 
from the great constructive spiritual task thus 



THE EDUCATIONAL CHALLENGE 1 65 

arising. All the ideal interests of the race are 
at stake. And a great share of this responsi- 
bility rests upon education. 

9. Once more, and above all, it concerns 
American educators that they should not fail 
to meet the challenge of the greatest ideal 
achievement of the zvar: the rare idealism with 
which America came into the war; the sense 
of the supremacy of the intangible values ; co- 
operation on an unheard-of scale; the well- 
nigh universal spirit of sacrifice; and the new 
revelation of common men. These, as we saw, 
are great enduring racial achievements and 
great possible permanent spiritual assets, and 
therefore a perpetual challenge to American 
educators themselves to incarnate these values, 
and to help all American citizens to carry them 
over into the time and tasks of peace. For 
these great ideal achievements constitute an 
enduring ground of appeal in education, in- 
estimably precious and powerful. These are 
our permanent trust and resource. Has edu- 
cation on the ideal side ever had a greater 
opportunity ? 



LECTURE VI 

THE NEW MIND : THE MORAL 
AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 



LECTURE VI 

THE NEW MIND: THE MORAL AND 
RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 

AS we review now the ground, so far 
covered, we are driven at every point 
to a steadily increasing sense of the 
necessity of the help which only morals and 
religion can bring. 

This crisis in the world's history revealed in 
the war, to begin with, was in large measure 
clearly due to moral and religious failure. 
Our spirituality had been too shallow, our 
Christianizing of civilization too superficial. 

The perils of our time — evil inheritance 
from the war, disillusionment, reaction, revolu- 
tion — could be fundamentally met only by 
moral and religious convictions, commitment 
and faith. 

The values of the new age, whether in cer- 
tain outstanding characteristics of the present 
world-order or in the moral demonstrations of 
the war, or in the greatest ideal achievements 
169 



170 THE NEW MIND 

of the war, all gave evidence of the working 
of moral and religious forces. 

The political, economic and social changes 
needed for progress toward the goal of human 
history, — a rational, ethical democracy, a so- 
ciety of developed independent and reverent 
personalities — themselves require an unselfish- 
ness, a reverence, and a faith in spiritual forces 
which morals and religion alone can give. 

As for the educational challenge of our time, 
we found we could not even describe a true 
education without involving moral considera- 
tions at every turn, — moral considerations, not 
only themselves growing out of the teaching 
of Jesus, but implying essentially religious 
faith and aims. Our whole discussion, thus, 
inevitably flows together and naturally culmi- 
nates in the consideration of the moral and 
religious challenge of the new age. 

I 
Grounds of Faith and Hope 
In the first place, in these difficult days of 
world crisis it is worth while bringing together 
in a simple survey some of the grounds of 
faith and hope, which have appeared in the 
course of our discussion. 

1. Here we may be thankful, first of all, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 171 

that men are compelled to face the facts, for 
this is the ground of all scientific control of 
forces, in movement toward any significant 
goal. We are all too ready to ignore uncom- 
fortable facts. It is well that now we cannot 
wholly evade them. 

2. We may count it a distinct gain, too, 
that men have been brought to a more chas- 
tened and humble mood in facing the tasks of 
world-reconstruction. For the humble open 
mind will succeed where conceit will fail. The 
most difficult part of these reconstruction tasks, 
moreover, involves a delicacy of insight, of 
feeling, of sympathy, that no cock-sure rule of 
thumb or jaunty confidence in inevitable prog- 
ress can compass. 

3. We have reason to be glad, indeed, that 
the crisis was not longer delayed; that weak- 
nesses — personal, class, national and interna- 
tional — have been laid bare in this earthquake 
shock, and may now be rooted out, as a help 
to that new mind without which the better 
world of our dreams cannot come. 

4. We may gain fresh assurance, too, from 
the favouring conditions which many of the 
trends of our time afford for the achievement 
of great new social goals for humanity: the 
irrefutable demonstration of the solidarity of 
the world, which the war has brought, that 



172 THE NEW MIND 

forces now a world-life upon us; the pro- 
digiously increased resources of power and 
wealth and knowledge made available through 
modern science for the forces of righteous- 
ness, if they will have them; the forced scien- 
tific cooperation and organization everywhere 
affecting earth's life; the world-wide trend to- 
ward democracy, and toward universal educa- 
tion with its vast possibilities; the beginnings 
at least of the establishment of a League of 
Nations — that may yet prove the greatest 
single outcome of the war; the steadily grow- 
ing internationalism discoverable in all realms 
of human life, that plays right into that true 
brotherhood of the peoples for which men 
must look ; and the growing evidence that men 
are setting larger and more significant and 
worthy goals for social progress, in harmony 
with moral and religious ideals. These all 
suggest the possibility of an alliance of great 
world forces and trends that could be mightily 
used for setting humanity forward. They give 
new solid ground for faith and hope. 

5. One's faith may be steadied and under- 
girded, too, as he recalls the repeated moral 
demonstrations of the war — of the power of 
the invisible things of character and belief; of 
the conviction that there was inescapable law 
in the spiritual world ; and of the mighty grip 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 1 73 

of the laws of God upon nations as well as 
upon individuals. It is in this inviolable moral 
world that righteous goals are to be wrought 
out. God Himself is in these laws of His and 
will work through them. 

6. And when we ponder those greatest 
ideal achievements of the war — the glorious 
idealism with which America came into the 
Avar; the deepening sense for millions of men 
of the supremacy of the intangible unseen 
values; the unexampled extent to which men 
voluntarily carried their cooperation for a 
great cause; the demonstration, on a world 
scale, of the capacity of men for sacrifice; and 
the resulting inspiring new revelation of com- 
mon men, with its new basis for democracy — 
we must believe that, in the very midst of an 
unexampled world-catastrophe, God Himself 
was mightily at work revealing Himself in and 
through men, and revealing the divine in men 
to themselves and to others. For these ideal 
achievements of the war in themselves make a 
wonderful apocalypse. How shall we not be- 
lieve and hope? 

7. Our study, too, of the political, economic 
and social changes demanded for the new age 
makes it clear that nowhere need we expect 
mere blind reaction to attain anything more 
than a purely temporary success. 



174 THE NEW MIND 

In the political sphere, the trend toward 
democracy is unmistakable and growing in 
power. We need not despair even of the 
League of Nations. In the realm of economics, 
while many still cannot see that a new day has 
dawned, the multitude of experiments in the 
industries, all seeking a larger measure of 
justice for the working man, not only make 
general reaction impossible, but bear witness 
to the working of a sense of justice that may 
be in a positive way revolutionary. And more 
radical elements in economic programs are 
likely to compel us all squarely to face the 
question, in the interests of all the people, of 
the permanence of the present economic sys- 
tem. 

In the whole field of comprehensive social 
programs, the greatest encouragement lies in 
the fact that thoughtful men everywhere are 
occupying themselves with the problem of the 
social order and of the social goal, and that 
the modern programs generally show a much 
greater sensitiveness to the deep significance 
of the ideal elements in the social order. Men 
are not to be satisfied simply with things. And 
this makes the problem of the true social order 
much more than the problem of the triumph 
of one class. It looks for emancipation for 
all the people in a community goal that 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 1 75 

shall make all members one of another for 
good. 

8. Nor does it need to be argued that 
education has great and indispensable help to 
give to the moral and religious forces, and so 
affords most significant grounds for faith and 
hope. The power and value of education we 
have seen, and the vital. contribution it has to 
make at its best to the ideal interests, in its 
end and spirit and method. For, when all is 
said, they are the end and spirit and method of 
human life itself. But we may well note here 
the specific aid it has to give in its content: its 
enlightenment as to the laws of that whole 
world of matter and spirit in which our ideals 
are to be wrought out; the scientific method 
itself in the survey of a great problem; and 
the ideal meaning of the very substance of 
education. Every one of the great elements 
in modern education which we noted — the 
scientific spirit and method, the historical 
spirit, the philosophic mind, aesthetic apprecia- 
tion, the social consciousness with its great 
ethical implications, and religious discernment 
and commitment — all these have moral and 
even religious implications and bearings. 

Personally to share in any one of these 
great racial achievements requires a spirit 
which is closely akin at least to the demands 



176 THE NEW MIND 

of the moral and religious. For example, there 
is hardly a closer historical parallel to the 
demand for the scientific spirit — with its in- 
sistence that a man should see straight, report 
exactly, and give an absolutely honest reaction 
upon the situation in which he is placed — than 
in Jesus' demand for utter inner integrity on 
the part of His disciples, with His constant 
direct appeal to their reason and conscience. 
" Why even of yourselves judge ye not what 
is right?" 

Education, therefore, fits right into the 
moral and religious program, and strengthens 
profoundly our faith and hope in the midst of 
these troublous times. It has solid and funda- 
mental help to give, for its power is knit up 
with the very laws of the universe and of the 
nature of man. 

9. Once more, it is a fresh ground for 
faith and hope that men have learned through 
the war to undertake great tasks, and that they 
are now actually daring to attempt greater 
goals than they would have dreamed possible 
before the war. Of this the Inter-Church 
World Movement is the most notable, but by 
no means the only, example. It is a great 
and inspiring thing that the moral and re- 
ligious forces of the country should be at- 
tempting world-surveys, and great-hearted 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 1 77 

world-aims. Ultimately this must mean a 
steadily clearing vision of inter-locking goals — 
personal and social, class and class, national 
and international. For the race is one, and the 
world is one, and the kingdom of the spirit, 
that is to be, is one. We can dare great things 
in line with the eternal purposes of God. 
Certainly confident faith and hope are within 
our reach. 

II 

The Basic Reality of Morals and Religion 
The survey of the grounds of faith and 
hope in the present world-situation — with all 
its crisis and chaos and unwonted perils — both 
suggests and illustrates the basic reality of 
morals and religion. It reveals, in days more 
critical perhaps than humanity has ever before 
known, how inevitable, how inescapable, the 
claims of the moral and religious life are. 
We have found that we cannot go to the 
bottom of any situation or question of these 
troublous days and not find ourselves face to 
face not only with some moral and religious 
demand, but, not less, with some inspiring hint 
of a solidly grounded faith and hope. It is 
also only through ethical and religious faith 
that we can bring fundamental unity and hope 
into our world-view at all. 



178 THE NEW MIND 

It does not belong to our present task to 
suggest the more general grounds for faith in 
the basic reality of morals and religion; nor 
is that necessary. Religion never had less need 
to apologize for its existence. It was not by 
accident that one of two great poems sent out 
to Chaplains of the American Army over-seas 
and to religious work secretaries of the Y. M. 
C. A., by the Religious Work Department of 
that organization was Francis Thompson's 
The Hound of Heaven, with its song of the 
pursuant inescapable love of God. 

I fled Him, down the nights and down the days; 

I fled Him, down the arches of the years ; 
I fled Him, down the labyrinthine ways 

Of my own mind; and in the mist of tears 
I hid from Him, and under running laughter. 
Up vistaed hopes, I sped; 
And shot, precipitated, 
Adown Titanic glooms of chasmed fears, 

From those strong Feet that followed, followed 
after. 

But with unhurrying chase, 

And unperturbed pace, 
Deliberate speed, majestic instancy, 

They beat — and a Voice beat 

More instant than the Feet — 
"All things betray thee, who betrayest Me." 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 1 79 

Ah, fondest, blindest, weakest, 
I am He Whom thou seekest ! 
Thou dravest love from thee, who dravest Me." 

Men are catching this vision of Francis 
Thompson's, we may believe, and never before 
as now. 

Ill 

The Inescapable Christ 

Nor is it only the general claim of morals 
and religion which our age in its upheaval and 
need is bringing home to men. It is Christ 
Himself whom men more and more find in- 
escapable. The whole world-situation puts us 
squarely face to face with Him — simply and 
straightly, because He has discerned the laws 
of the moral universe as no other has ; and be- 
cause, above all others, He has incarnated what 
He taught, so that He becomes literally the 
Master of Life, supreme in the Bible as well as 
out of the Bible. In all the higher ranges of 
their life many who do not call themselves by 
His name at all, still in very deed live by Him — 
by His insights, His ideals, His hopes. So es- 
sential is He to the life of the spirit. 

For example, it is His all-embracing law of 
love — endless and self-giving and holding for 
both God and man — which we find alone 



180 THE NEW MIND 

bringing unity into the world of the spirit, 
whether we are thinking of the individual or 
of the nation or of the race. It is in a truly 
unselfish love that His fundamental paradox— 
finding one's life by losing it — is most clearly 
revealed. And that paradox the world has 
been verifying as never before, for millions 
have found the way of sacrifice, of self -giving, 
the way of liberty and life. 

It is His supreme principle of reverence for 
the person, to be shown in every personal rela- 
tion, which we feel compelled to put at the base 
both of our education and of our civilization, 
as the essential spirit of both. 

It is His paradoxical method of fellowship 
and independence which we are driven to apply 
as alone adequate, whether in the education and 
progress of the schools or of life. 

It is the end He set before His disciples, — the 
kind of person and the kind of society which 
He portrayed — a brotherhood of reverent per- 
sons — which we too, the longer we study our 
problem, feel constrained to make the goal of 
the race and of human history. 

It is the new mind, which He so accurately 
described in the Beatitudes — the showing of 
the eight facets of the jewel of a true love — as 
necessary to the world-crisis of His time, which 
we must recognize as fundamentally needed, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE l8l 

quality by quality, for the world-crisis of our 
own day. 

For this is no time for half-way measures or 
for shallow remedies. Political and economic 
prescriptions — much as they are needed — will 
not suffice. There can be no light and easy 
healing of the hurt of the peoples in this time 
of a world sick unto death. The conditions 
of enduring national greatness are moral — the 
war has proved it. The absolute essentials of 
a world of peace and good-will are spiritual, 
as those who are willing to go to the bottom 
of the world's need to-day clearly see. 

This is the significance of one of the most 
remarkable editorials of the war on " The 
Greatest of These" [New Republic, December 
21, 1918] by one of the most far-sighted and 
radical of American editors, not given over- 
much to emphasize upon the moral and relig- 
ious. In the course of that editorial he sets 
forth the dire need, the only adequate remedy, 
and its endless justification: 

The starvation, the anarchy, and the bank- 
ruptcy which are now threatening Europe may in 
the end frustrate and sterilize more human lives, 
arouse more enduring hatreds, work results more 
menacing to the future of civilization than war 
itself. Although the fighting is over, there is no 
peace in the world, little confidence in one an- 



182 THE NEW MIND 

other or in the future, little common understand- 
ing and good-will. . . . 

Christians who have lifted the veil and looked 
into the face of Christ must believe that the limi- 
tation of Christ is precisely and entirely what the 
Christian peoples need to deliver them from the 
bondage of their bankrupt social economy, from 
the least tolerable of their present sufferings and 
from the dread of impending calamity. . . . 

There is nothing in modern social knowledge 
which discourages us from seeking individual 
and social deliverance through the limitation of 
Christ. On the contrary, modern psychology, 
modern penology, and modern education all 
recommend a way of enhancing human life which 
seeks to release men and women from fears, ha- 
treds, suspicions, greeds, and debts to their own 
past. 

To the paramount necessity of applying the 
mind and spirit of Christ to the whole vast 
problem of the world's need — this it is, curi- 
ously enough, to which these terrible years of 
war have driven us. As another has said: 



There are many signs that the time has come, 
and that men see that the time has come, to make 
the experiment of applied Christianity on a scale 
as large as the world. 

For nations and races as well as for individuals, 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 183 

the way of unselfish service and sacrifice is the 
way of freedom and peace and power. 

IV 

Christian World Civilisation 
Our goal thus is a definitely Christian world- 
civilization. Nothing less will suffice. What 
should it mean? 

1. To that end we are to be sure, first of 
all, that our Christianity is the Christianity of 
Christ Himself, measuring up both to His 
ideals and to His consciousness of Himself and 
of His mission. One of the things that the war 
was surely doing, for those who could see, was 
sifting out all those types of Christianity which 
did not truly reflect Christ: a Christianity 
primarily theological, a Christianity primarily 
emotional, a Christianity primarily ceremonial, 
a Christianity that adopts God as a kind of 
national or racial perquisite, and an Old Testa- 
ment kind of Christianity. All these alike 
failed to stand the crucial test of this world 
crisis. All these kinds of Christianity were 
readily harmonized in all the belligerent na- 
tions in this war with a bitterness and hatred 
and ferocity utterly unchristlike. 

Christ's Christianity was of no two-sided 
order— one standard for individuals, another 



1 84 THE NEW MIND 

for states; or one kind of Christianity for us 
and another kind of Christianity for the classes 
or races we thought below us. His Christian- 
ity is a Christianity of honesty and love, of 
utter inner integrity and genuine tireless un- 
selfish good-will. As one said of Julian Gren- 
fell: "God, it is good to think of a soul so 
wholly devoid of pettiness and humbug, the 
cynicism and dishonesty of so much that we 
see." Surely the fires of the war should have 
done something to burn out the dross in our 
religious lives. 

Above all, it should be plain that Christ 
knows no negative kind of Christianity. The 
very essence of religion for Him is a personal 
sharing in the Father's tireless self-giving love 
in His eternal purposes of good, identifying our 
wills with His will, as we take on His purposing 
of all the great positive values of the kingdom 
of God. To that mighty loving will of God 
we do not merely submit; we rejoice in it, and 
take it on as our own, and make its triumph 
our triumph. All the greatest goals of the 
great causes and the great ideals are here en- 
closed. 

2. We cannot live up to this Christianity of 
Christ and His world-view and not definitely 
seek a civilisation spiritually based. The war 
held no more solemn warning than that con- 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 185 

tained in the fact that an essentially anti-Chris- 
tian interpretation of civilization and national 
life came frightfully near to prevailing, — to 
strangling what the world had of a Christian 
civilization. That meant, as we have seen, 
that our Christianizing of civilization at its 
best had been too superficial, that it had not 
premeated to the core of our civilization; that 
we had had a pagan standard for nations side 
by side with a Christian standard for individ- 
uals. And just so far as the old selfish na- 
tional diplomacy and intrigue are still going 
on, we are still a house divided against itself. 
There is no saving this world by any process 
that does not recognize one moral law, one 
Christian spirit, as binding upon our zuhole 
civilization from top to bottom. 

The debt of Western civilization to Chris- 
tianity is already beyond estimate, as Canon 
Holland testifies: 

Western civilization is a body with a soul. It 
depends on the active energy of this animating 
consciousness. And, when you come to look into 
this determining conscience, you cannot but rec- 
ognize that it is the moral deposit of historic 
Christianity. Its growth, its structure, its em- 
phasis, its proportions, are the result of a pro- 
longed Christian effort. It may but imperfectly 
represent the full Christian ideal, but it is never- 



186 THE NEW MIND 

theless inexplicable without presupposing it. It 
depends on Christian values, it accepts Christian 
standards, it has been bred in a Christian atmos- 
phere, it follows from Christian premises. It is 
soaked through and through with Christian be- 
liefs. Its sensitiveness to the rights of the in- 
dividual man, to the position of woman, to the 
claims of purity and truth, to the calls for service 
and self-sacrifice, have their spring and source in 
the mind of Christ, in the creed of the Incarna- 
tion. 

It is only by giving full right of way at every 
point to this permeating spirit of Christianity 
that a Christian civilization can be finally tri- 
umphant. 

3. And, above all, we may not forget that 
the task Christ set His disciples was not run- 
ning away from the world but conquering the 
world; not merely through missionary activity, 
but through the mastery by the Christian spirit 
of all the forces and resources and methods 
and institutions and aims of the world-life. 
There is a new attitude required here. The 
war proved that the world-life was so emphat- 
ically one that you could not leave a half of it 
pagan and Christianize the remainder. The 
Christian forces, therefore, may not run away 
from the full task of Christianizing our entire 
civilization. Else the Kingdom of God per- 
ishes. 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 187 

But history shows that the greatest failure 
of the Christian institutions and forces has 
been, not in pioneer and simple conditions, but 
rather in advanced and complex situations, 
where resources were abundant. There has 
been a tendency to flee from the world, rather 
than to conquer the world. The challenge, 
therefore, which the present world-crisis brings 
to the Christian forces, is a challenge definitely 
to break that tendency,— to break the whole 
negative relation to the world, and to seek in- 
stead a positive world conquest in learning to 
be in the world but not of the world, to use the 
world as not abusing it. The Christian forces 
are bound to " overcome the world," bound to 
bind all its resources of wealth and power and 
knowledge and beauty to the chariot of the all- 
embracing and ongoing purposes of God. 
Our educational institutions, our welfare 
agencies, and our churches must all alike learn 
to master great material resources and not be 
mastered by them. They must cherish unceas- 
ingly great unselfish community goals. 

4. There is no more signal way, by which 
this positive Christian conquest of the world 
can be set forward just now, than by making 
sure that we carry over into the tasks of peace 
those greatest ideal achievements of the zvar, 
of which I would once more remind you — the 



1 88 THE NEW MIND 

rare idealism with which America came into 
the war; the deepening sense for millions of 
men of the supremacy of the intangible values; 
the unexampled extent to which men volun- 
tarily carried their cooperation for a great 
cause; the demonstration on a world scale of 
the capacity of men for sacrifice; and the re- 
sulting new revelation of common men, with 
its new basis for democracy. 

We have seen how significant it was that in 
every one of these values we had a great racial 
achievement, and a great possible Christian 
asset, — a permanent ground of powerful ap- 
peal. But more than this is true. Every one 
of these great achievements is itself a challenge 
to individuals, to communities, to institutions, 
to classes, to the whole nation, to preserve it, 
to apply it, to fulfill it. For spiritual values 
like these can truly go on only as they are in- 
carnated in human lives. Moral and religious 
education has here, as we have seen, a supreme 
opportunity. 

These ideal achievements all involve certain 
definite practical goals. They mean, in the 
first place, that there is just one way in which 
America can be true to her own highest na- 
tional achievement, and that is by " carrying 
on" along the line of that achievement now; 
by showing now a like idealism, a like unself- 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 1 89 

ishness, a like willingness to take her full share 
of world responsibility. The natural way to 
have done all this was to have kept a united 
nation freed from selfish partisanship ; to have 
taken our place in the League of Nations ; and 
to have been willing to take on a large and sig- 
nificant mandate, for example, in the Near 
East. It was possible for us, as the one great 
power territorially disinterested, to do there 
what no other nation could do. We could 
have cleared up one of the greatest plague spots 
of the world. 

And even now it is impossible to believe that 
America can remain contented to turn her back 
upon starving humanity. The appeal of the 
facts, as Mr. Henry P. Davison of the Red 
Cross puts it, I cannot forbear quoting. This 
appeal of the facts must surely reach the con- 
science of the American people: 

We are going to find out that we can no more 
escape the influence of the European situation 
of to-day than we were able to escape the war 
itself. You cannot have one-half of the world 
starving and the other half eating. We must help 
put Europe on its feet or we must participate in 
Europe's misery. Let it be admitted, if you will, 
that neither Wilson nor Roosevelt have had the 
right to speak for the idealism of America [in 
pledging our sustained friendship and help] ; it 



190 THE NEW MIND 

still remains true that a man is lying wounded 
by the roadside. He is stripped of his raiment, 
he is half dead, and America (rich and pros- 
perous) is passing by on the other side. . . . 
Whatever the developments were later and what- 
ever the merits or the reasons, do not forget that 
to Europe we are all-important and gave them 
every reason to believe that we were there and 
there to stick and that now we seem to have 
turned our backs. ... I know that if our 
people had a full realization of the situation we 
would at once say to our government: 

Quite irrespective of any obligation, quite ir- 
respective of the fact that we find ourselves the 
only country possessed of many of the supplies 
which Europe needs and which cannot be pur- 
chased or given in sufficient volume on credit; 
quite irrespective of our own problems at home 
(and put it all, if you please, upon a commercial 
basis), we ask you to arrange at once to place 
within the reach of those peoples that which they 
need to save them and start them on their way 
to recovery. We ask you to do this under con- 
ditions and upon terms which will best insure the 
success of the undertaking. But we ask you to 
do it. One of the conditions we would impose 
would be that politics should be eliminated from 
the handling of this task both in this country and 
in Europe, and that the financial terms should 
be such as not to work a hardship which would 
defeat its own purpose. 

I believe that any conditions dictated by justice 



MORAL AND RELIGIOUS CHALLENGE 191 

and common sense would be unanimously ac- 
cepted, and I also believe that such a step taken 
by our government would not only be hailed with 
joyous hope on the part of the nations of the 
world, but that most cordial and immediate co- 
operation would be forthcoming from Great 
Britain, Holland, the Scandinavian countries, 
Spain, Japan and France, Italy and Belgium to 
the best of their ability, and perhaps other coun- 
tries as well. [The Survey, April 24, 1920.] 

For America to do less than this is to repu- 
diate indeed that rare idealism with which she 
came into the war. 

These greatest ideal achievements mean, 
also, that the forces of righteousness can count 
on the permanent power of the ideal sacrificial 
appeal to men; that they are not, therefore, to 
make the mistake of pitching their appeal too 
low ; that, on the contrary, they are to see that 
what men want from the ideal forces, from the 
Christian churches, is not easy terms or "sissy " 
tasks, but a great worth-while program and a 
man's job. 

Men know, too, that this cannot be without 
cooperation of a kind and on a scale that rivals 
the marvellous cooperation of the war. The 
indubitable fact, moreover, that spiritual values 
are always personal suggests that the churches 
themselves must never forget that even the 



192 THE NEW MIND 

churches, as institutions, are means, not ends; 
that they are made for the highest service of 
men, not men for them ; that they are justified 
only by their fruit in personal lives; and 
that they should in themselves illustrate that 
brotherhood of free and reverent personalities 
which is the goal of human progress. 



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